Vetinari In Absentia
by Mercator
Summary: Vetinari has no job, no home and no money. What he does have is his mistress, his wits and a motley group of allies. Does Downey stand a chance? 3rd in the Seamstress Series (Began with Say Yes). FINI!
1. I

** And now for something for people who've been wondering what Havelock and his mistress have been up to lately. Thank you **Merrymoll** for giving me a title so I could finally post the thing. The story is dedicated to **Jurious**, the first to put Hanna's face on paper, and beautifully at that. (*hugs*). Enjoy chapter 1, and rest assured this story won't be anywhere near as long as Rulers. I'm thinking 10 chapters tops. For people new to the Hanna-Havvie thing, the story that started the series is "Say Yes" in the R section and next came "Conspiracy of Beers" in the general audience section.**

I.

            It took an hour for the verdict to be delivered by a smiling Lord Downey.

            "Havelock, I'm afraid you're unemployed. You had a good run, old chap, but the Council has decided you're due for a rest. I say, you _do_ look a tad tired." 

            They were not in the dungeon of the Palace of Ankh-Morpork because Downey suspected no cell in a building where Lord Havelock Vetinari had lived and worked for fifteen years was secure enough to keep him. Instead, one of the roomier cells in the Tanty had been converted for Vetinari during the trial. He was there now, sitting in what looked like an aged plush-seated dining room chair that had found itself among the eclectic furniture in the city jail. The small mattress against the wall was almost clean, the mirror on the wall broken only in a few places, the razor beside the sliver of soap only uncomfortably dulled. Despite the simple accommodations, Vetinari managed to look well-groomed. The shadows under his eyes betrayed the fact that he was not well-rested. 

            "May I ask what the vote was?" he said quietly.

            Downey took a seat opposite. "Interesting you should ask. I assumed there would be some dissent. The evidence against you in some areas was not all that strong, frankly. But the four or five votes I thought you were guaranteed didn't materialize. A mystery."

            Not much of one. During the trial, the Throne Room at the Palace was converted into a court room by the addition of long tables and a raised platform from which evidence was presented and arguments made. The tables were occupied by most of the members of the City Council. The missing members, those not allowed to participate in the vote on the removal of Vetinari as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, were forced to sit in the back with the spectators or weren't there at all. They were the handful of people most likely to put up a fuss about the coup.

            From the Assassins, of course. There was something about the Assassins Guild that made it a breeding ground for men who had an itching to get rid of Vetinari despite the fact that he'd been educated there and still had a finger in the proverbial pot as Provost of Assassins. But it had happened before, an attempt on his life by a former president of the guild. And now there was Downey. Reactionary Downey. Silk-stocking Downey. Bullying schoolboy Downey. 

            Using his head. 

            His first night in jail, Vetinari had found this last point the most irritating. Noblemen and civic leaders who walked around _thinking_ were the most dangerous of all. 

            Downey was not a man normally given to brilliant plots but he had apparently learned enough in his role as head of the Assassins Guild that a brilliant plot was not going to topple Vetinari, the master of plots and anti-plots. So he hit on an alternative.       

            Randomness. 

            This, not organized opposition or quiet scheming or even a bold show of arms, could tip Vetinari from his post. A conspiracy of one, Downey had thought through what he needed for The Day, wrote down nothing, confided in no one, and then suddenly he made an appointment with the Patrician and arrived with a half dozen loyal Assassins. It was a random day, a split-second decision. He hadn't even told his men why he wanted them to accompany him to the Palace. 

            Within ten minutes of sealing off the Oblong Office, a statement had been issued: Lord Havelock Vetinari has been arrested. All inquiries of a municipal nature will be addressed to Lord F. J. Bartholemew Downey.

            A fait accompli is far harder to fight. Vetinari's enemies celebrated and his allies scrambled to keep their own skins. Allegiances shifted faster than even Downey had expected. By his first night in the Tanty, Vetinari was effectively without support. Except for a few select people Downey had known would be uncooperative.

            One of them, Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh, had been relieved of his post as head of the City Watch as soon as he refused to accept Downey's new title of "Acting Patrician." The order to turn Vimes out of Pseudopolis Yard had been filled by the Palace Guard, which didn't like the Watch anyway. The Tanty was being run by the Guard at the moment and was, of course, ringed by Assassins. The last thing Downey needed was Vetinari slipping out.

            "I'm sure you're wondering what happens now," said Downey, leaning back comfortably in his chair. "_Are_ you wondering?"

            Vetinari fixed his gaze on Downey's hands.

            "I'll tell you anyway. A former Patrician guilty of abuse of power… pardon, _found_ guilty in a fair court of law…who did as much for the city as you have doesn't quite deserve the ultimate punishment. That seems to be the going sentiment. At the moment." Downey smiled cheerfully. "And seeing as you love sunlight, the Council has found a delightful place for you to take a much-needed rest for the next…oh…ten years or so." 

            There was no reaction from Vetinari.

            "You remember the island of Khavos, don't you?" said Downey. "It was quite fashionable a few years back for wealthy families to rent the villa there for the summer. I was there about ten years ago. Exquisite, I assure you. A veritable island paradise lapped by the waves of the Circle Sea. A thousand delightful miles away."

            Downey's smile widened but Vetinari remained impassive. 

            "What a time you will have!" said Downey, clapping his hands. "And to show its gratitude for the positive things you've done, the Council has agreed to pay for up to two hundred pounds of personal effects to be shipped with you and… Oh, did I forget to mention that your private funds have been confiscated?" 

            Vetinari ignored the question.

            "I didn't think it necessary but the Council insisted. Talk of you skimming over the years and so on. All unfounded, I'm sure. But nevertheless, we must bow to the will of the Council, eh? In its wisdom, it also granted you the right to take some company with you so that you could not accuse them of sending you into a lonely retirement. One companion may go to help you wile away the long, blisteringly sunny days. You will be leaving in the morning so I suggest you tell us now who the lucky person will be."

            Vetinari stared in silence at Downey, who started to fidget under the gaze.

            "Come now, Havelock. Surely there is someone, one single person in this great city of ours, who you think would be willing to share your extended holiday."

            The stare didn't waver.

            Downey shook his head. "I find that a rather sad state of affairs. I realize that your former duties as patrician were time-consuming but it is astounding you did not find the time to cultivate at least one friend or family member who can stand your company long enough to survive it on a solitary island. It hits me right here." He tapped his heart.

            Even at this, Vetinari chose not to react. It was getting on Downey's nerves, the calmness and silence.

            "We shall choose for you, then. A servant responsible for packing your things. The Council thought it best that you not be allowed to do this yourself."

            A slow smile spread across Vetinari's face. Downey turned cold despite the half dozen men in black who stood silently at the wall behind them, their hands folded patiently but in split-second reach of a weapon. 

            "You're quite right," said Vetinari. "A holiday would be a refreshing change. I also find the idea of going alone and without luggage appealing. I would arrive free as a bird, hm?" He nodded and stared into space as if imagining pleasant times ahead. 

            "Am I to understand you wish no companion, and to take none of your personal effects?"

            "That is a masterly summation, Downey."

            "Then I will oblige you." Downey bowed slightly. "I wish you a pleasant journey and a very relaxing decade."


	2. II

** Forgot to add in chapter 1 that of course this is just fanfiction, DW belongs to Terry Pratchett, etc.  Jenny – I only lurk and pick up a bit of the lingo. I find it all a bit intimidating for some reason. Reviewers – Thanks for the comments!  And now, let's follow Havvie into exile, shall we? **

II.

            There was luggage after all. No one would tell him who packed it, but he deduced it quickly enough from the selection of books he found in a small chest the guards had carried, along with several trunks and wooden crates, into the hold of the Ephebian ship the _Tolmae_. A partition of worm-eaten slats had been thrown up between the little space reserved for Vetinari and the rest of the hold, which was full of barrels and crates destined for trade on the other side of the Circle Sea.

            At dawn the docks had overflowed with spectators eager to witness the historic occasion of Lord Havelock Vetinari going into exile. A guarded carriage rumbled directly up to the gangplank and deposited him on the dock. He glimpsed the crowd for only a few moments before being escorted politely but firmly onto the ship. A field of faces he had never seen before, quite a few that he had. They all shared the same mildly shocked expression.

            On ship he sat on one of the trunks, a lantern with the smell of fried bacon fat swinging over his head, and noted how he had underestimated Downey's ambition and boldness. When Vetinari and Downey had studied together at the Assassins Guild School thirty years before, Downey had been an arrogant git. When Downey was a lord moving up in the administration of the Guild, he was an arrogant git. When he became president of the Guild, he was…yes…an arrogant git.

            Consistency was a wonderful thing. Vetinari had liked having Downey around because the man was predictable. 

            Alas…

            Even he had unexpected depths. 

            Vetinari sighed. It was all rather embarrassing. Like being overthrown by a bad-tempered, ill-trained sheep dog of average intelligence but above-average bite. 

            He turned his attention back to the small chest made of stained teak sitting next to him on a trunk. It was familiar to him, though it wasn't his. As far as he knew, the chest was normally full of scarves and shawls, not things a gentleman would normally take on a journey. That it contained books was a delightful surprise, especially when he began to browse through them. He couldn't resist; he was a bookish sort of person and there wasn't anything else to do at the moment. None of the volumes were political; there were quite a few history books he'd been meaning to read, one or two novels, several plays by Hwel in folio form, a few foreign language dictionaries, a thesaurus, an anatomy, several bound books of blank paper and, interestingly enough, a geographic narrative of the Disc, a mammoth work that took up a good portion of the space inside the chest. Vetinari settled it onto his lap and opened it at the bookmark. He hadn't read the entire book yet but he knew who had been working through it in small bits the past year. The marked page began a description of the island of Khavos. Vetinari read for a moment, then lifted the book up closer to the lantern. 

            Pale pencil lines underscored certain words. _Open_ was one, in a sentence referring to the open plain on the rimward side of the island. Then there was a _the_. Then an underlined _trunk_ in a sentence that talked about the unusual trunk and branches of the Khavian dragon tree. 

            He repacked the books, hefted the chest off the trunk it had been sitting on and quickly undid the straps and buckles. The ship lurched, catching Vetinari bent over at the moment of pulling the trunk from the wall; he gripped the straps to keep his balance. It was a series of waves, waters choppy enough to make the ship sway worse than it had when it was still in the calmer waters near Ankh-Morpork. It was a sign that he was in open sea.

            When things settled, he made space so that both halves of the trunk could rest on the floor. Black cloth lining covered each half. On one side he found a folded supply of black robes. He drew some aside. Beneath was a layer of shirts and breeches. He reached beneath them and felt…

            …heard…

            …a muffled sound, very faint. He piled his clothes to the side until he found a small black bundle, which he unwrapped gently. 

            It was a cage that contained two birds. Vetinari was no bird expert but these two were on the young side and looked like the pigeons the City Watch used to run messages. They were groggy, needing air. He made little clicking noises and softly tapped the cage. One of the birds opened its eyes. The other kicked a leg, which had a small leather tube attached. Empty.

            The second trunk contained assorted items including handkerchiefs of red, white and black, monogrammed towels, soap, Vetinari's shaving kit and, as he dug to the bottom, items of clothing he would not normally think to pack if left to his own devices: Several simple thin chemises in white or yellow with bits of lace or ribbon around the cuffs and neck, two pairs of silk stockings, a corset, a long-sleeved gown in dark blue, a red summer dress. 

            The last trunk stood upright. He pulled it open quickly and caught the carpet as it fell into his arms.

            It was an intricate pattern, blood red, bits of white and black, of Klatchian make. He eased it to the floor and unrolled it carefully. Strands of light brown hair stuck up out of the center of the roll. 

            Lord Vetinari was not surprised to find a woman sprawled out on the open carpet, gulping up the vaguely fishy air of the hold. He knew of course that he'd opened the trunks in the wrong order and that finding her clothing had spoiled a bit of the drama.

            "Finally," she gasped. "Gods, I thought you'd never find me."  

            Hanna Stein pulled herself painfully against a crate. She was a seamstress under contract with Vetinari, his mistress, so to speak, but better paid. Why she had risen so high in her profession could be seen by the fact that she had just been unrolled from a carpet in a steamer trunk on the hold of a ship sailing into exile and _still_ managed to smile as if she'd just come across Vetinari at a cocktail party. 

            He sat on the carpet beside her. "I see the guards were very thorough about searching the luggage."

            "They had the wrong set. I paid the captain for a last-minute switch." 

            She began slowly unbuttoning the tunic she was wearing. The bandage on her right hand made it difficult. "It was ungrateful of you not to invite me along after everything I've done," she said.

            The lining of the tunic looked like a honeycomb of small pockets. From each came a reassuring golden gleam of metal. 

            "Sybil helped me. We sewed day and night on your damned robes. I took them as soon as I heard about the arrest. The hems have all the jewelry I own. The handkerchiefs are the colour of clacks flags for a reason. I sewed your manuscript in between pages of the Hwel folios. Vimes sent the pigeons with his compliments on getting him booted out of a job." Hanna paused for breath. "I also got a clacks out to your aunt. Drumknott has your agents in the city on stand-by. He took Wuffles and Leonard with him. Some files from your office too. I don't know where they are now. Did I forget anything?" 

            Vetinari had been staring at the collar of the shirt Hanna wore underneath the tunic. The top couple of buttons were undone, revealing a bit of the skin of her throat. She noticed where his gaze was and tried to close the tunic but he gently pulled her hands away and undid a few more buttons. Blue-black bruises were set out against the skin of her neck as if someone had daubed them on with a thick paint brush. He worked his way lower and found a walnut-sized bruise below her collar bone, a plum-coloured one at her left breast, another at her left ribs. Not severe bruises; they would heal quickly. But they were…there.

            He carefully unwrapped the bandage on her hand. The knuckles were black and swollen, far worse than the bruises on her chest. She could barely bend her fingers.

            "That's my fault," said Hanna. "I went to see Downey last night and I-- They'll need to plaster that patch of wall outside your office again."

            She tried to do up the shirt but couldn't manage the small buttons. Vetinari brushed her hands away and did it himself.

            "You should have stayed in the city," he said quietly. 

            "I don't have anywhere to go. I'm banned from the Palace and Guild and my house has been confiscated, something to do with you misappropriating funds, bloody nonsense."

            He was suddenly on his feet, pacing the few open feet in his section of the hold.

            "You could go to your family."

            "They have enough problems without me. Downey is getting the Lawyers Guild to look at confiscating the breweries. My family will be lucky to have the shirts on their backs when it's over."

            Vetinari reached the wooden partition, spun around and marched back.

            "You have friends who could take you in."

            "This may come as a shock to you, but most of my friends' husbands don't  like you. I'm sure they think helping me means helping you. Which is true."

            He reached the upright trunk, turned again.

            "Vimes would have protected you."

            "He has his own worries. Downey wants to break up the Watch and integrate it with the Palace Guard." Hanna rubbed her eyes. "Stop pacing, your lordship. It's driving me insane."

            He kept pacing. "Your presence is inconvenient."

            "Would you like me to jump overboard?"

            "I can't hide you indefinitely."

            "You don't need to hide me."

            He stopped. 

            "We have a deal," she said.

            Hanna was leaning back against the crate, her head resting on it, her eyes closed. She looked like she'd just eaten something rotten.

            "Downey probably won't hold up his end because he's a bastard but he did give me his word…" she sniffed, "…as a gentleman. For what that's worth. He wouldn't let me just come on board, but… He said if I'm found at sea there's nothing much he can do about it." She shrugged. "We'll see what the guards were ordered to do with me."

            The ship rolled over a wave, then another, the contents of the hold shifting back and forth. Vetinari held onto a bit of hemp rope on the partition and watched the lantern swing, the flame of the candle dimming as melted fat splashed up the wick. He breathed in time to the swing.

            "You should have let me come," said Hanna. "I was forced to--"

            Vetinari held up a hand for silence. 

            The ship calmed. The candle in the lantern brightened, though it was far from the clear, true light given off by the quality wax candles Vetinari was used to. It was enough light to see on one of the crates the small wooden board the captain had left behind containing a bread loaf, a hunk of cheese and a hard salami. There was no knife. Those that Vetinari routinely carried with him, including the small ones in his shoes, had been confiscated by Downey. 

            Hanna pulled up her left trouser leg. Three of Vetinari's slim knives, ones he usually kept in his desk in the Oblong Office, were strapped in scabbards to her calf. He unbuckled them without a word, selected one and portioned out the meal. They ate in silence, swaying with the ship as it worked its way further into the open sea, the sound of the waves exaggerated in the hold. When they were finished, Vetinari fetched the geography tome and settled beside Hanna.

            "Shall we read about our little island?" he said, browsing the pages.

            He began reading as if he was giving a lecture at a geographic society. He enjoyed reading aloud, controlling the pace and tone of his voice, and Hanna usually found it pleasant to listen to him. But it was different now. Faster, strained, the words clipped. 

            He heard it himself and struggled for control and almost achieved it by the bottom of the first page. Early in life he had learned that if he spoke calmly while angry he soon calmed. 

            He turned the page and kept reading.

            Emotions that had no use except for the spoiling of his ability to think objectively dissolved in the measured tone of his voice. By the bottom of the second page, he was reading at a calm, pleasant pace.

            Hanna shifted against the crate, trying to find a more comfortable way to lean against it. There wasn't one so she settled back and continued to listen.

            In the middle of a sentence about the rare Khavian Royal Palm, Vetinari kissed her on the temple, then resumed reading like there had never been a break.


	3. III

** I couldn't resist the Hanna's Cleopatra to Vetinari's Caesar reference, **Tindomiel**! **Jenny**, yes, it's the volume and the minute knowledge so many people have of obscure DW stuff. I'm a fan but I'm not anything compared to many afpers! **Twist**, are you ever coherent, chica? (*grin*) So…on with the story! **

III.

            In Ankh-Morpork, it rained. 

            July rain, coming down hard like it was milked from the sky. The clouds were only sporadic so that Shades dwellers were fashioning sun hats out of dirty postcards while butlers in the fine houses in Ankh were shutting windows to keep the damask curtains dry.

            The rain didn't bother Lady Sybil Ramkin Vimes. Despite the good soak her thick dragon protection gear was getting, she performed the tasks that needed to be done around the pens, tasks involving buckets, shovels, unpleasant odors, occasional graceless leaps behind barriers set up strategically for the times when the littler dragons just learning to digest hard food failed to keep it down. A dragon's digestion was explosive.

            She carried a bucket in each fist across the barn, handed one full of coal to an assistant who helped do the dirty work, and continued with the second, more malodorous bucket to a side door. She opened it. A young Assassin straightened up as if he'd been caught slouching. Which he had. He had a sensitive, aristocratic face, heavy on the nose and light on the eyes and lips. The nose twitched as he stared at the contents of the bucket.

            "Lady Bigelow-Smythe isn't keeping down her kibble," said Sybil briskly. "This is fresh, and I've got to examine it before it goes boom."

            "Will it go boom?" asked the Assassin, holding a delicate black handkerchief to his nose.

            "At any moment, you and I will be covered in very unpleasant acids if I don't get this into a controlled container right away."

            This was an explanation Sybil was proud of having come up with. It seemed to impress the Assassin. Or the smell did. Under orders from Downey, he was to control for unnecessary communications between the Vimeses and certain "undesirable elements." Vimes had thrown the first half dozen Assassins off his property but had given up when Sybil pointed out that there was only one of him and thousands of Assassins in the city. Better to be polite and consult the Guild of Lawyers. Until the legal question was sorted out, Sybil invited the rotating crew of Assassins for tea or dragon tending tutorials and had quickly got the reputation at the Guild for being the least desirable assignment in the city. 

            Yet Lord Downey was convinced the Vimeses had to be watched. Sam Vimes wasn't a loose canon, he was a loaded, aimed and lit one pointing directly at the Palace. He'd been like that when he was Watch Commander but Lord Vetinari had encouraged him to serve the law, not the office of the Patrician or the man who filled it. The trial hadn't convinced Vimes that Downey's coup was legal, so of course he was removed from his post. A good number of the coppers went with him as a sort of mass protest. Downey was perfectly aware that they would become a corps of dissidents if not in sympathy with Vetinari, at least in opposition to the new regime. They had to be watched at the source.

            For every Assassin the Vimeses could see near the house and grounds, they assumed there were a half dozen they couldn't. Which was true.

            The Assassin holding his nose in front of Sybil knew that his duty was to search the bucket. But he was also a gentleman and had not gone to the Assassins School to poke around in what the dragon brought up. He stepped aside.

            Sybil hurried down the path to the infirmary, where three of the sickest dragons slept in stalls with protective walls. All dragons had a low level instability that made the pens something of a hospital. Sybil had made such a careful study of some illnesses that she'd written a book about them. She could work in her little laboratory, a part of the infirmary that stunk so unbearably that the Assassins would never enter it. Illness was not their style.

            Humming to herself, she plunked the bucket onto a counter, looked around to see if she was being watched just in case, and used a ladle to scoop out a hand-sized cylinder made of brown pottery and sealed at the top. After rinsing it off, she set the cylinder on the floor in front of a hole that resembled the entrance to a mouse sanctuary between the walls. Then she set about ladling the contents of the bucket into separate bowls and beakers and generally making the kind of observations she would do if she was really interested in examining the contents of Lady Bigelow-Smythe's stomach.

            A half hour later, she glanced at the wall. The cylinder was gone.

            Ex-Watch Corporal Buggy Swires, gnome, chewed a leaf of fresh mint as he sprinted between the walls, his rucksack weighed down by the cylinder. He ducked into a tunnel lately occupied by a family of garden snakes he'd summarily evicted, and proceeded in total darkness, following his nose and sense of direction. The tunnel the snakes had made and Buggy had expanded extended under the gardens of the Ramkin House and connected up with a system of additional tunnels that went off in every direction. Buggy Swires, and anyone else under ten inches tall, could get almost anywhere in Ankh-Morpork without being seen. The Assassins had not allowed in gnomes. More fool them. The Assassins monitoring the Ramkin property were oblivious to the subterranean activity.

            Buggy made good progress and could soon feel by the dampening of the tunnel walls and the coolness that he was nearing the river. He chose the left branch of the tunnel and rushed down. 

            He heard nothing. Not a twitch of a whisker, not a swish of tail or the natter of sharp teeth. Buggy smelled it, though. The obstruction.

            He spat out his mint leaf and drew a truncheon out of his belt the size of a butter knife. Actually, it was a butter knife.

            "There ain't room in this here tunnel for the both of us," he said.

            The rat didn't seem impressed. It was a brown rat from the Ankh, proud of its bacteria-infested hide and reputation for mercilessness and dirty fighting. It was a Shades rat.

            Buggy didn't wait for it to attack.

***

            "Three million dollars."

            The Patrician Lord Downey folded his hands carefully and set them on the thick stack of papers in front of him. He was in the Oblong Office, sitting in a new chair of rose wood with a spongy seat and back with wings to block any projectile aimed at his profile, a knife embedded in secret compartments in each arm. Vetinari's chair had been removed, chopped up and burned, an attempt to rid the office of something resembling his ghost. It hadn't really worked. Downey's heart still skipped when there was a knock at the door, and he found himself looking over his shoulder, half expecting Vetinari to materialize out of the shadows like a wraith.

            He had spent his first week as Patrician jimmying open locked drawers and file cabinets, purging the Palace staff and, just that day, looking over the city finances. He was playing with the idea of throwing some sort of festival for the citizens to show them what a personable, man-of-the-people type Patrician he wanted them to believe he was going to be. But there appeared to be a problem.

            "Three million dollars," he repeated.

            "3,139,426 dollars," corrected the accountant sitting opposite Downey with a folio on his knees. "Once you have that, the treasury will be solvent. A festival would cost no more than about 100,000. No problem."

            "No problem? How did Vetinari keep this place running on an empty treasury?"

            The accountant looked over his spectacles at Lord Downey as if he expected the Patrician to fail to grasp what he was about to say.

            "Debt," he said.

            "But everybody owes _us_ money! There's not a country on the Disc that doesn't hold promissory notes from us."

            "There are eleven countries on the Disc that do not hold promissory notes from Ankh-Morpork," said the accountant. "The larger ones do, though, yes."

            "And?"

            "Your lordship?"

            "Why is the treasury empty?"

            "You do not fill a treasury with credit slips, your lordship."

            Downey absently picked up a small dagger he'd been using to pry open various desk drawers and began flipping it in his hand.

            "Who did Vetinari borrow from?" he asked.

            "From Ankh-Morpork," said the accountant. 

            The dagger point penetrated the desk top so firmly that it didn't waver.

            "He borrowed funds for the Ankh-Morpork treasury from…Ankh-Morpork," said Downey.

            "Not exactly, your lordship. He borrowed funds for the Ankh-Morpork treasury from Ankh-Morpork _on paper_. There is a difference." 

***

            Buggy Swires swung the bread knife into a defensive position at the moment the rat took a second swipe at his legs with its claws. Buggy's initial attack hadn't gone as well as he'd hoped; the full charge while screaming a high-pitched gnomic battle cry had ended with him swatted to the side of the tunnel, rolling for a moment over Sybil's cylinder and springing back to his feet to counter the rat's rebound. 

            Two creatures with excellent night vision fighting in a pitch black tunnel looked much like two creatures fighting in broad daylight, the showdown glare of the eyes, reading muscle movements, twitches, blinks of the opponent to see where he'd move next.

            With a loud crack, the flat of Buggy's knife collided with the rat's right front leg. It screeched and lunged, teeth bared and at the last moment, spun around to allow its tail to strike Buggy's arm like a whip. The knife fell. Before Buggy could react, the rat closed its claws around it.

***

            Downey flipped once again through the paper stack in front of him. The city budget. All 839 pages of it. Tables covered the pages, columns of numbers, some in parentheses, some with plusses, some printed in italics, some in bold. There were sub-totals and totals, adjustments of quarterly projections, lists of outstanding bills of exchange. There were comments on taxes and tariffs, liens and liquidity. Downey had always left the budget of the Assassins Guild to the burser. Math had not been his strong point at school and his family was wealthy enough to make an interest in economics unnecessary. He needed a list of definitions of key terms before he could even begin to decipher what lay in front of him.

            The accountant cleared his throat. "This is municipal finance, your lordship. It doesn't matter how much money is actually in the treasury. Goodness, I don't believe I've been in the vaults in years. What matters is public confidence."

            "How do you pay the city staff with public confidence?" said Downey. "It won't pay for a gourmet sausage or a room on Easy Street." 

            "If others believe the government will one fine day," the accountant waved a hand, "in the faraway future make good on its debts, they will act in a certain way. They will accept a relationship with the government which is a benefit to us both. Business contracts with advance payments, tax relief, trade privileges and so on."

            Downey latched onto this.

            "Advance payments. Vetinari got businesses to pay him for privileges?"

            "He negotiated a system in which companies and the government coexisted in a mutually beneficial economic environment," the accountant corrected. "Last year when Lord Vetinari successfully convinced the Tsortians to lower their harbour taxes on Morporkian goods, it benefited all city manufacturers trading there. If we take the case of caviar, we were in a better position to negotiate for the twelve tons of caviar required by the Palace per year."

            Downey pried his knife from the desktop. "This place doesn't smell like fish, and even Vetinari didn't like dried toast enough to eat all of that."

            "Of course not. An order for twelve tons of caviar does not mean it shows up on the Palace steps. A portion of it does, and the rest is delivered in hard currency with the understanding that the business relationship with the Palace will continue until the contracted amount – in this case, the value of twelve tons of caviar in today's dollars -- is paid in, perhaps, thirty years. The manufacturer can use this lucrative contract to pad its profit figures and attract investment while the Palace can cover its costs. Which are, may I add, quite modest for the administration in a city of the size of Ankh-Morpork." 

            Downey sat back in the chair, his head aching slightly because he thought he'd finally got it. "Vetinari borrowed from Ankh-Morpork thirty years from now."

            "In some cases twenty. Fifteen even. It's a gamble. Three out of five companies fail before their tenth year in business. At which point, of course, all contracts with the Palace are void. It is amazing how few people read the small print." For the first time, the accountant smiled. 

            Downey tucked his knife away. "If this works so well, why did you inform me that we need three million dollars?"

            "Public confidence, your lordship," said the accountant mildly. "At the moment, it appears there is none."

***

            Buggy Swires was running. Once the rat had the knife, Buggy was defenseless, which usually wasn't a problem with the old Swires gnomic grip. But he had a cylinder on his back, a mission to do and no room in the tunnel to scramble onto the rat's back. 

            The rat had to drop the knife to follow. They raced back up the hill to the houses of Ankh, Buggy fumbling around in a side pocket of his rucksack as he ran. A short tunnel to the left, a sprint, and he finally pulled out what he was looking for.

            There was a tearing sound and a hiss.

            Then there was light.

***

            "There is a hesitation on the part of the business community to enter into new contracts with the new regime at the Palace," said the accountant.

            "It will stabilize," said Downey with confidence. "Time heals all wounds. And I'm certainly not going to fund a bunch of maids, thief-catchers and malingering guards out of my own purse."

            The accountant shrugged. "You could wait, sir. There are reserves for six weeks. In the meantime, Palace operations must be narrowed.  That could lead to a certain amount of…dissatisfaction."

            Downey tapped the arms of his chair. He didn't much like economics but he was enjoying the conversation with the accountant. The scope of it. This wasn't just guild business. This was Disc wide. What he said now would affect millions of people on both sides of the city gates. He smiled. 

            "I can't have my staff dissatisfied. Call in some of the foreign debts."

            The accountant blinked.

            "I must strongly discourage you from that course, sir. The delicate balance of trade between--"

            The knife flipped in the air, tumbling blade to hilt, blade to hilt. The accountant watched it fall perfectly into Downey's hand.

            "This conversation is finished," said the Patrician.

***

            Buggy had an advantage over the rat for two reasons. First, he knew what would happen when he struck the match. Second, he could close his eyes when it happened.

            The rat careened to a halt, blinded.

            Buggy's eyes adjusted faster. He waved the fire at the rat and it backed up, scrambling to get its legs in order, to feel with its tail where it was going. It backed into another side tunnel. Buggy now blocked the entrance. He carefully set the match on the soil and added several more until a bonfire made it impossible for the rat to follow him without getting singed.

            "Told you, mate," said Buggy, hefting the cylinder more securely on his back. "This here is _my_ tunnel."

            He retraced his steps quickly, muttering about damn rats making him late, and emerged from a rabbit hole at the edge of the Ankh river. It had just stopped raining. He hitched a ride on the lip of a raft loaded with barrels and drifted down river until his nose could pick out a whiff of salt air from the stink of the Ankh. He'd reached the delta, the harbour where ships lay in safety to be packed and unpacked for the journey across the Circle Sea. He jumped onto the cable of a passing ship, swung onto the docks and found the Tackle Box.

            It was a sailor pub. There was a good deal of shanty singing and drinking and brawls indoors but the real action happened out back. In the late afternoon, several seamstresses were already exposing their wares.

            Gnomes had opinions about human women. Usually regarding their feet and ankles, or the seductive curve of a lower knee. Buggy had always been ambitious and made claims about his experiences with women that no one had cared to try to substantiate. When he swaggered up to the seamstresses, the only one who noticed was the one who was looking out for him to begin with. She had red hair, red painted toe nails and a short skirt. 

            Buggy grinned up at her. 

            "Get your beady little gnome eyes off me," said Anuschka. Her mood was less than positive. She'd started her career on the docks but had come a long way since then and was only there behind the Tackle Box because Hanna was her friend and Mrs. Palm had ordered her. "It's about time. Where have you been?"

            "Gettin' the old Buggy fires burnin', darlin'," he said, wagging his hips. Even from her height five feet above him, Anuschka noticed.

            "Leave the stuff and clear off." 

            "You sure? The Buggy has been a pleasant surprise to ladies across the city."

            "I'm sure. Leave the stuff."

            Buggy took his time tucking the cylinder into a converted strap of Anuschka's sandal while craning his neck for a better view of the petticoat canopy over his head. Anuschka kicked him and stalked off. 

            There was a second woman leaning against the wall of the Tackle Box, a brunette.

            Buggy rubbed his hands.


	4. IV

IV.

            Khavos was the second smallest island of an archipelago fifty miles off the Ephebian coast. Most of the islands had a sprinkling of villages made up of goat herders and fishermen speaking a dialect of Ephebian. But Khavos had been uninhabited until two hundred years before when an eccentric horticulturist from Ankh purchased the island, declared himself the Baron of Khavos and set neighboring islanders to build a luxurious villa and guest house on a cliff overlooking the sea. When he died the last of his line, he willed the island to Ankh-Morpork, which had allowed various lords and ladies over the years to maintain the house and grounds as an especially secluded holiday spot.

            The first glimpse Lord Vetinari had of it was from the starboard deck of the ship as the sun came up on the third day of the voyage. Khavos was shaped like an old tortoise, roughly round, smooth at the edges where the waves rippled over volcanic rock, growing wilder in the interior, the land rising to a crest in the center of the island. A string of cloud hovered over the peak of the volcano and extended across the length of the island, but it appeared from a distance to be an effect only in the highlands; the sky over the coast was cloudless.

            The ship dropped anchor. Sailors loaded the trunks and crates into several row boats, directed by one of the Assassins who had introduced himself to Vetinari as Mr. Townsend. He had the kind of straw blond hair normally seen on children and eyes an almost disturbingly pale blue. He chain smoked as the loading work was done, flicking the butts into the water. Most of the Assassins hired as guards, the luggage, edibles and alcohol (Downey had donated a crate of fine cognac from the family stores) were shuttled over to the coast in shifts. Vetinari and the remaining guards went last.

            Hanna wasn't there. The second morning of the voyage a crewman discovered her stowing away under the tarp of the rowboat. Townsend was not surprised to see her but still  locked her in one of the bunks for the rest of the trip. Vetinari managed to look surprised when he was informed that Hanna was on board.

            Once on the island, he and his guards trekked up the hill to the villa. 

            It was salmon-coloured, trimmed in white and dotted with black stones, rows of windows on three floors facing out over the cliff to the sea, balconies stretching across the second level and roof terraces blooming with foliage. It had twelve bedrooms, two dining rooms, a stocked library, a wine cellar and all of the other amenities necessary for a country gentleman. It was small compared to the Winter Palace of Ankh-Morpork but massive for one man on a deserted island. 

            The white-clad servants were brothers and sisters, past middle age, as much fixtures in the old house as the chandeliers. They bowed to Vetinari at the top of the villa steps. The gardener, wearing a green smock over his white suit, showed off the guest house on the rimward edge of the gardens where the Assassins would share the bedrooms. Downey had a decades-old dislike for Vetinari but his class-consciousness overruled these feelings; a lord in exile should not have to sleep under the same roof as his guards.

            Vetinari settled in. The first thing he did was fashion suitable hiding places for the more interesting items Hanna had packed in his luggage.

            Two days later, she was rowed to the island. Townsend had sent a clacks asking for direction and Downey had consented to her remaining on the island under the condition that she and Vetinari never be alone together. Ever. It was obvious that surveillance would be around the clock. 

            The _Tolmae_ finally pulled up anchor and left the island cut off from the outside world. Almost. Once a week a ship would bring supplies, perishables and mail.

            A few days later, they tramped like a parade.

            Lord Vetinari, head bent, stick swinging, black robe flaring out behind him, blazed the trail across a cactus-dotted stretch of dried ground on the slope of the volcano. He made only one concession to the hot weather: He was wearing a large, floppy straw hat.

            Hanna was a few steps behind him, having a hard time keeping up. The one thing she was not blessed with as a seamstress was long legs. For every one of Vetinari's long strides, she took two steps. She was trying not to show how out of breath she was.

            Behind her, nine Assassins were sweating through their black suit coats. It was the day shift, assigned to watch Vetinari and Hanna during daylight hours. They'd been in a disciplined line when the trek started outside the villa early that morning. But as the day wore on, the sun and heat and the pace Vetinari set took away some of their chic. 

            There was nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Vetinari had told no one when they started out that he intended to walk around the entire island. If Hanna had known she would have stayed home and that's why he hadn't told. "A stroll," he'd called it.

            In ten hours they had taken one break, a ten-minute stop in a citrus grove. The Assassins gorged themselves on fruit, six, eight, ten oranges to a man, while Vetinari peeled two oranges with his fingernails and handed one to Hanna. He shook his head when she asked him to peel a second one for her. 

            By the time the sun was sloping on the horizon, the Assassins were straggling along behind, some dropping out into the bushes, clutching their stomachs. Though Vetinari was in front of them he paid close attention to who was doing what. Which Assassins felt it beneath them to loosen their ties in the heat, which had the concentrated faces of men fighting natural digestive processes, which bobbed into the trees again and again. Lord Vetinari was a great believer in observing people in uncomfortable conditions. How they dealt with them revealed all you really needed to know about their personalities.

            He hadn't expected much from the day shift Assassins. Downey had a limited selection of men willing to act as guards for a six-month assignment on an island a thousand miles from Ankh-Morpork. Several of them had been sent as punishment, Vetinari could see, a couple of the youngest were fresh out of the Guild School, the others were likely single and needed the money. Assassins didn't actually fill contracts that often and the less wealthy ones would have welcomed a chance to earn a bit extra. Only the leader of the day shift Assassins seemed to take the trek with some kind of style. Kinsey. He'd taken an interest in many of the unusual plants the group had passed during the day. Touching them but never plucking them from the ground.

            "Are we almost there?" complained Hanna.

            "I believe the villa is just around that bend."

            "I'm exhausted. It's ridiculous." She glared at the back of his head. "Why aren't you more tired? You're much older than I am."

            "I set the pace."

            He glanced behind him. Several Assassins were wiping their faces with their ties. It was a convenient opportunity to slow down and take Hanna's hand. She knew enough not to look at him in surprise. He occasionally held her hand if they were sitting together in private but it was unheard of in public. There was a reason she didn't instantly think Lord Vetinari was airing one of the little intimacies they shared when no one was looking: the very small folded square of paper pressed into the palm of her hand.

            "Ten years ago I could've run around this island," she said, shaking her head. "Even five years ago I was in better shape than I am now. You've made me soft, your lordship."

            "Oh, I do hope not."

            The villa came into view on a crest up ahead. Most of the Assassins straggling behind started chatting with relief. The sun was lower in the sky; the men of the day shift would soon be allowed to drop into their beds.        

            Supper was ready for them, a long dining room table set for Vetinari and Hanna, another in the guest house for the Assassins. A servant stayed in the dining room at all times. Hanna managed to slip the note inside the bandage on her right hand.

            When she and Vetinari retired to their rooms, a night shift Assassin stationed himself outside of each door. Hanna undressed slowly, her bad hand aching, and checked the bruises on her chest in the mirror. He hadn't asked how she got them and she hadn't offered the information. Hanna was a seamstress. She'd experienced worse in her career, and she wasn't going to whine about a few bruises, as unpleasant as it had been to get them. 

            She unfolded the note Vetinari had slipped to her at the end of their hike. It contained a good deal of information for such a small piece of paper. His handwriting, tiny letters in perfect rows from one edge of the paper to the other, made maximum use of limited space. The only allowance for conventions: a "My dear Hanna" at the top of the page followed by a line drop, and at the end: "Yours sincerely, a Secret Admirer." In between were Hanna's instructions. She read the note twice, held it over a candle until it curled into ash, and eased herself into bed.

***

            After the successful test of what was coming to be called the Underground Clacks, a message system that criss-crossed Ankh-Morpork below the streets, the opposition to Lord Downey got organized.

            Samuel Vimes was as surprised as anybody else to find that he was, in fact, the opposition. Expected to take a lead in it, at least. The Underground Clacks had been thought up and implemented by Sybil, who was taking to plotting with alarming speed. She'd even volunteered to sew secret pockets on the inside of his Watch armour.

            He'd taken her up on the offer and wore it now as he meandered through the streets of Ankh-Morpork just after dusk. Four of the Assassins tailing him he'd been able to shake with some quick turns up alleys, dashes through courtyards, cuts into hole-in-the-wall eateries that always had back doors to alleys an Assassin with any breeding wouldn't dare enter. 

            For the last Assassin, Vimes reserved special treatment. He whipped around a corner, sprinted up a dark dead end and…disappeared.

            The Assassin had been tailing him from the rooftops. There were no convenient hatches or chimneys for him to shimmy into the building from, so he swung himself onto a gable, hung suspended for a moment, then dropped silently into the alley.

            The plank wasn't a two by four but it did the job.

            The Assassin cried out and crumbled to the ground, clutching his knee. 

            Without letting go of the plank, Vimes struck a match one-handed on his thumb and relit the cigar in his teeth. 

            "Dear me, look at that. Posh lad like you wandering about the Shades at night. Tsk, tsk." 

            The Assassin tried to get up but thought twice when Vimes absently waved the plank around.

            "Surveillance or contract?" 

            "Surveillance, sir."

            "Is that right?" A cloud of smoke billowed up and joined the regular fumes of the alley. "Do you like rats, lad?"

            The Assassin had not been expecting this turn in the conversation.

            "Not particularly, sir."

            Vimes pointed at a scuffed up door facing the alley. Bins of trash jumbled just outside of it, part of the origin of the alley's pungent smell.

            "That there is the back door to Gimlet's Delicatessen. Mr. Gimlet is a nice man, wouldn't do anybody a nick of harm. He's so nice that when I go in there and ask him to bring out one of his cages of fresh, live and probably angry rats about to end their lives on a stick dipped in special sauce, he'll do it. He'll even get one of his busboys to sit right there on the steps with the cage. I reckon Mr. Gimlet would even be nice enough to approve if the boy opened the cage if you move a muscle in the next half hour." He exhaled slowly. "Like I said, a nice man, Mr. Gimlet."

            The Assassin looked over at the scuffed-up door, then down the alley, and up at the buildings around him.

             "You're assessing your chances, lad, but I don't recommend it," said Vimes. "Take my advice. Sit tight. In your condition, a gaggle of angry rats is not what you want to face." He dropped the plank and made his way to the door. "My regards to the Guild."

            Inside, Vimes spoke briefly to Gimlet, then strolled out the front door and back into the streets. One of Gimlet's busboys draped a cloth over an empty cage and went out back for a long cigarette break.

            Vimes soon found Featherbone Alley. Not the best of addresses, even for the Shades. Technically, it wasn't even an address. It wasn't on any of the official city maps. It wasn't even an alley. It was an alley of an alley, a dank side street that came up by surprise. In this part of the Shades, the buildings were nested like honeycombs. They were lucky if there was a shaft for the privy from the upper floors. Featherbone snaked in between and behind buildings that from the regular streets looked like one solid city block. The people who lived back there had reached social sea level. You couldn't get any lower.

            Vimes reached a certain door that was as high as his shoulders, and rapped on it three times. A rasping voice said: "What's the password?"

            "Open the bloody door."

            "Righto."

            It was a single room, beyond dank. It was dunk. A simple wooden table in the center of the room, a half dozen chairs, most of them occupied by people trying hard not to look too closely at the others. Mrs. Rosemary Palm, head of the Seamstress Guild, was chairing the meeting.

            "Now that you're here, Sam, we can get this thing started." She sighed and looked around the table. "I thought I wouldn't have to do this nonsense anymore. Plotting. I had enough of that under Winder and Snapcase."        

            "We're not plotting," said the man with yellowish eyes and a wiry beard that covered the bottom half of his face. "We are…exploring our options."

            A little man with glasses and a pale, mild face raised his hand.

            "Yes, Mr. Fisk?"

            "I'm here to plot. If that is all right with you."

            "It may be useful." Mrs. Palm turned to her left. "What are your views on the subject?"

            "I am at your service," said Rufus Drumknott, Lord Vetinari's head clerk, now unemployed.   

            The man with the raspy voice cleared his throat but it didn't help.

            "On behalf of the Thieves Guild, I'd like to say that a mix of plotting and more neutral exploring of options is more comfortable for us."

            "Thank you, Mr. Gloss." Mrs. Palm folded her hands and looked over at Vimes. "How fast do you think Lord Vetinari will get a message to you?"

            "Depends. The pigeons are the best we had. We got them on the ship but it's possible they were discovered. Or they could lose their way trying to get back here. A thousand miles is a piece of flying for a city pigeon."

            "They will not be discovered," said Drumknott. "His lordship will see to that."

            "Won't know until I get a pigeon," said Vimes. "Calculating a couple days flight with allowance for some rests here and there, maybe we'll get something by the end of the week. Unless Vetinari's being cautious. We don't know what he's dealing with on that island."

            "Eighteen Assassins as guards," said Mr. Fisk promptly. "Divided into day and night shifts. Lord Downey has ordered twenty-four-hour surveillance."

            "On Hanna too, I assume?" asked Mrs. Palm.

            "Oh, yes. Lord Downey seems to think Lord Vetinari will be pacified to some extent if she's there."

            "What does he mean, pacified?"

            "Content," said Mr. Fisk. "Or at least, too busy with her to do much plotting. The Assassins also have more leverage on the island. Lord Vetinari can take care of himself, of course, but Miss Stein is a point of vulnerability."

            Drumknott cracked a cynical smile.

            "The Seamstresses filed a formal complaint," said Mrs. Palm, "as much as that will bring us. Downey had no right to send Hanna into exile."

            "Or Lord Vetinari," said Mr. Fisk. "I think that's why we're here, isn't it?"

            Vimes spoke up. "She wasn't sent, Rosie. She didn't tell you what she planned to do?"

            "She didn't tell me a thing." Mrs. Palm gave Vimes a look that told a slightly different story. 

            The group shifted onto a different point, the problem the City Council had faced when forced to approve a trial for Vetinari, then confirm Downey as Patrician, while Assassins lined the walls of the Rats Chamber. That was Mrs. Palm's biggest complaint, Vimes knew. Hanna was a detail; the Seamstress Guild was really angry that its president had been shut out of the decision making, rigged as it was. He turned his attention to Mr. Gloss. A thief, the new vice president, if Vimes remembered his guild politics correctly. Thieves and Assassins had always got along like slumpie and caviar, the Thieves accusing the Assassins of being uppity and soft, the Assassins accusing the Thieves of being low-brow, uneducated and without style. Old gripes that hadn't gone away even though both Guilds had changed under Vetinari's rule. The Assassins School allowed in more poor and middle class students. The Thieves had opened quite an advanced school of their own which attracted upper class students with an itching to pinch the finer things in life – paintings, jewelry, antiquities and so on. Downey hadn't yet appointed anyone to fill his chair as president of the Assassins Guild. As long as he was both Patrician and Guild president, the Assassins had an immense amount of power in the city. Too much for the Thieves.      

            The man with the yellow eyes was talking softly.

            "I have only spoken with certain groups from my community," he said. "There is a general uneasiness about Downey's intentions. He was never a friend of Non-humans and the Undead." He turned to Vimes. "I'm told that this is the reason most of them left the Watch as soon as Downey took personal control of it."

            "I'm not allowed within fifty feet of a watch house," said Vimes, scowling. "But Nobby and Frank and Carrot pop up to the house now and then to tell me what's going on. Angua and Littlebottom and Buggy and the rest are being watched."

            "Persecution based on species," said the yellow-eyed man. "There will be consequences if this spreads in my community."

            Drumknott had been listening silently, following the conversation with interest. 

            "May I make an observation?" He removed his glasses and polished them patiently on the edge of his jacket. "Those of us around this table do not have a tremendous amount of power at the moment. We won't be storming the Palace and we obviously don't have recourse to an Assassin. But if his lordship has taught me one thing, it is that power is not nearly as important as influence."

            Mr. Fisk smiled slowly.

            Vimes puffed on his cigar for a moment, blowing the smoke up at the ceiling. "I think I'm following you, Mr. Drumknott. A little pressure here and there and we can keep Downey on his toes, eh?"

            Drumknott folded his hands.

            The rest of the company looked at each other, eyes meeting with silent understanding. They each came from a different sector of Ankh-Morpork. With a little influence, they could see to it that the relatively smooth running of the city that the citizens were used to under Vetinari came to a stop. It wouldn't bring the city to a stand still but it would surely make things difficult for the powers that be.

            And that was the point.


	5. V

** Thanks for the reviews everyone. Let the plotting begin!**

V.

            The day shift had it hard. 

            An Assassin almost always wore black, or at least dark colours, and he was because of his profession more comfortable in darkness. The night was an Assassin's playground, cool, mysterious, draping him like a cloak.

            June on the island of Khavos averaged temperatures high enough to make the Assassin Kinsey, head of the day shift, shock his comrades by discarding his black suit coat, conducting his surveillance of Vetinari in shirt sleeves and a pair of sandals he'd fashioned out of leather straps from a couple of extra knife scabbards he'd brought along. Kinsey was from an impoverished noble family and had thus acquired a habit of practicality that sometimes shocked gentlemen of means. He cropped short his dark hair contrary to the fashion for shoulder-length locks tied back with ribbon. In Ankh-Morpork he had packed a snack bag for long periods of surveillance rather than abandoning his post at the dinner hour (for Assassins, 4 a.m.) and seeking a restaurant that catered to the guild and always had a quality white chilling on the sideboard. He never visited the seamstresses, insisting there were better things to spend his hard-earned money on. Despite these eccentricities he was well-respected and Downey had appointed him to head up the team of Assassins whose responsibility it was to shadow Hanna and Vetinari during daylight hours. This less desirable shift was made up of middle class merchant's sons or former scholarship boys from the Guild School. The gentlemen of means worked the night shift.

            Downey forbade the Assassins to speak to the exiles except when absolutely necessary, but Kinsey had an easy-going nature and greeted Vetinari and Hanna politely in the morning when they left the house. The Assassins rarely entered the villa during the day except to do random searches. Downey ordered these for their annoyance value.

            "Good morning, sir," said Kinsey, strolling up to Vetinari, who was wearing a broad-brimmed hat and bending over a flowering bush on an upper terrace of the garden. "Ganglian Butter Rose you've found there, sir."

            "Indeed, Mr. Kinsey." Vetinari took a pair of sheers from a cloth bag over his shoulder and snipped a rose at the stem.

            "Just for your information, sir, we've all taken antidotes against Ganglian poison," said Kinsey.

            "A worthy move." Vetinari held the rose up to the sunlight. "Such an intense yellow. Magnificent in the sunshine, eh?"

            "It'll start to fade quickly, sir, if you don't get it in water."

            "Thank you for the tip, Mr. Kinsey." Vetinari set the rose in his bag and smiled pleasantly. "I am delighted to see you have taken so well to working in daytime. I know when I was at the Guild, night work was so much more pleasant."

            "Guild service day or night," said Kinsey.

            "Naturally. Naturally. But still a bit…uncomfortable." Vetinari motioned toward Kinsey's sandals. "A practical adjustment there. Not Guild regulation footwear but practical."

            Kinsey looked embarrassed. "I would never wear this kind of thing in Ankh-Morpork, sir. The conditions here are different."

            "Ah, yes. We have Ganglian Butter Roses in all their natural beauty growing wild on the slopes of the mountains. We have twelve hours of near cloudless sky. We have..." he shaded his eyes and looked up, "…a hot sun that one might call merciless if we were to attribute human motives to a star. I am thinking twice about my choice of clothing as well." To illustrate, he undid the first few buttons on the collar of his robe.

            "It is a bit warm, sir," said Kinsey. He felt that Vetinari's relaxing of the dress code  allowed him to loosen his tie.

            "At least," said Vetinari, "you have the consolation of extra pay over your night-working colleagues for enduring the unpleasantness of the day shift. I'm sure it makes the unfortunate conditions here a tad more bearable. Ah! I do believe I've spotted a Starlitz. This garden is truly marvellous, Mr. Kinsey." 

He shouldered his bag and continued his stroll through the garden, stopping now and again to admire a bloom.

**

            The sea was at its mildest in the evening, when the waves took more gentle tumbles over the black islands of rock that acted as breakers further out from the coast. 

            It was the best time to swim. Hanna floated on her back and stared up at the starry sky. It was a bigger sky than she had ever seen. Most of her life was spent in Ankh-Morpork where the sky was lit up by a million candles, lanterns and localized fires and the next horizon was probably a Klatchian take away. There were no horizons in the city. The few sea voyages she had taken were spent on deck staring at the place where sky and water met. The edge of the world.

            She turned over and started swimming toward the shallows, letting the incoming tide pick her up and carry her in. When she could finally stand up, the bathing suit she'd found in her bedroom wardrobe hung off her body like flabs of extra skin. Some Ankh lady had left it, a lady with substantially more to her than Hanna. It extended from her shoulders to her knees and was striped. Hanna hated stripes. She was buttering up the housekeeper with gold in hopes she'd sew something more Hanna's style.

            The wind picked up, the temperature a good fifteen degrees cooler than in daytime. Hanna shivered.

            "Miss Stein!"

            Townsend, head of the night shift Assassins, was up the beach, a towel over his arm. She waved at him, crossed the coarse sand carefully and took the towel with a smile.

            "How cold it's become, Mr. Townsend!" She wrapped the towel around her and rubbed it vigorously back and forth. Her hand still ached when she moved her fingers but she was healing quickly.

            Townsend was a gentleman and thus made a point of not appearing to be looking anywhere near Hanna's bare legs. His pale hair seemed to glow in the starlight. Hanna wondered how practical that was for an Assassin.

            "I am so, so sorry," she said.

            "Pardon?"

            "You're not here to watch me swim or to fetch towels. My goodness, you're an Assassin. _Nil mortifi, sine lucre_."

            "I am not doing volunteer work." Townsend offered her a cigarette, which she took. As a seamstress she had found social smoking to be a useful talent. 

            They smoked together for a while.

            "I don't know if I could do it under the same circumstances," said Hanna.

            "I'm sorry?"

            "I'm a seamstress. _Nil volupti, sine lucre_. No play until you pay. No pay unless there's play of some kind. You know what I mean, Mr. Townsend. You can't pay a seamstress and expect her to serve drinks at a pub. That isn't what she's trained to do." She took a drag of the cigarette. "That's why I'm sorry. For all of you, really. Guild Assassins unable to practice your profession here."

            Townsend smiled. "We will if the opportunity arises."

            "I know that." Hanna smiled with him. "Believe me, I hope it doesn't. My best years are behind me but I'm not retiring yet."

            "I assumed you were getting paid to be here."

            "I'm charging Lord Vetinari double my contract rates. On paper anyway. He doesn't have any money at the moment." She sighed. "I'm promised plenty of lucre, but there's no volupti going on these days. I hope that'll change once his lordship adjusts to exile."

            "We still have to be sure you stay apart nights."

            "Then at some point the day shift will get a show." 

            Townsend smirked.

            "At least that'll be something, won't it?" said Hanna. "It's not like there's anything else to see on this bloody island. Thank goodness I'm getting something extra for the conditions here. No shops, no theaters, no restaurants. It's disgraceful. You won't have to inhume me, Mr. Townsend; I'll be dead of boredom by next week." 

            After a wish good night, Hanna continued to smoke as she walked back up to the villa. Townsend followed at a distance, aware that somewhere invisible in the foliage were other Assassins, the part of the night shift not assigned to watch the house to be sure Vetinari didn't leave it. Those assigned to Hanna had of course been watching. 

            And listening.

**

            The Thieves in the know called it Breaking and Entering.

            There had always been some version of this in Ankh-Morpork, even after Lord Vetinari legalized the Thieves Guild and the men previously used to dank dens got themselves respectable houses and a few servants and advanced the novel idea of offering citizens the chance to purchase the right not to be burgled. As long as freelancers were kept in line, the system worked. People paid up and many a thief found himself with a satisfyingly expanding waistline.

            It wouldn't do to disturb a good thing, so Mr. Gloss came up with an alternative. 

            In Breaking and Entering, the Thief chose a dark, still night to put a crowbar to a cellar door or back gate of a random house in Ankh. Perhaps a window was quietly broken, a lock silently sawed. That was the Breaking part.

            The Thief entered the house, looked around and – this was the important bit – _didn't steal anything_. This was the Entering.

            After a short breather, the Thief slipped away, empty handed. 

            The interesting thing was, when the servants of a lord or lady discovered a sawed lock or broken window, they suspected each other of staging it as a cover up for their own dishonest acts. The master and mistress suspected them too. There was a general search of the servants quarters and a mad search to discover what exactly had been stolen. It had to be something. Nobody broke into a house in order not to steal.

            It happened at the house of Lord Rust. The Selachiis summarily fired their entire household staff. Lord Venturi bought a pit bull. Even the Downey family villa was not immune. 

            When Ankh-Morpork's upper class discovered that the Breaking and Entering appeared to be a trend, they took the business to Downey. Downey turned it over to the Palace Guard, which turned it over to what was left of the Watch. Captain Carrot, who Vimes had urged to stay on, did a thorough investigation with a couple of his best men and concluded that the houses had not been burgled by a person or persons unknown. There wasn't much more he could do. He was told not to. By Vimes.

            Inquiries the Palace made to the Thieves Guild received the following answer: Breaking and Entering without Thieving is out of the purview of the Guild.

**

            Rufus Drumknott sat in a rented attic room on Cheapside, a stack of papers in front of him. He had been Vetinari's head clerk, a job that required a good deal of quickness, patience and savvy. The healthy competition among clerks at the Palace also meant that Drumknott without his master was a man without allies. 

            Some time ago, Vetinari had advised him: "Consult the Seamstresses if you ever need a helping hand."

            It wasn't hard for Drumknott to ascertain if Vetinari was being ironic. He almost always was. But after the coup, Drumknott had quickly contacted Mrs. Palm and declared himself at her service. 

            There was a little wooden desk in the room, two chairs and two small beds. A stove would allow for coal heat in the winter, but Drumknott assumed he wouldn't be there long enough to use it. 

            Leonard of Quirm had been told this but he still spent a good part of his day kneeling in front of the stove with the box of wire, springs, tools and bits of metal he'd managed to secure before his flight from his attic workshop at the Palace. He insisted he could transform the inefficient pot-belly stove into a device that, as far as Drumknott could follow, would produce energy by splitting thaums. The clerk didn't think it a good idea but the project kept Leonard occupied. 

            At the table, Drumknott slowly unrolled a new message from Vimes, read it quickly, and smiled. A stocking foot rubbed the stomach of Wuffles, Vetinari's terrier, who was used to sleeping under Vetinari's desk at the Oblong Office. One desk was as good as another. He snored contentedly in the bed Drumknott had fashioned out of a paper box and a blanket.

            Drumknott had taken a stack of files from the Palace that his lordship had instructed him to guard should anything "inconvenient" happen. One was labelled 7956a. Most of the files had numbers on the label. Only he and Vetinari knew the code. 

            He glanced through the papers in 7956a. Downey's name showed up on almost every page. One paper Drumknott lingered on, then took out, laying it separate on the desktop. He readied a fresh sheet of fine paper, inked a pen, examined the paper from the file very closely, and began to write. Every few seconds he paused to look at the paper. He wrote very, very carefully.

            The note from Vimes curled itself back up into a tube by the ink pot. It said several things, scuttlebutt from the streets gathered by watchmen out of work because of their species or loyalty to Vimes. Only one part interested Drumknott. 

            _Detritus says troll community uneasy. _

            Ex-Watch Sergeant Detritus was a troll. Drumknott didn't know him personally but he was still a bit sorry that he'd have to upset the sergeant and his people even more.


	6. VI

VI.

            Hanna angrily brushed her hand over the chess board, knocking the pieces off the little game table. 

            "I've said it once and I'll say it again: This is the most humiliating piece of boredom ever invented."

            "You could have at least waited until you were properly in checkmate," said Lord Vetinari. "You had eleven possible moves to avoid the attack of my…"

            She ignored him, bowed under the table and started picking up the pieces. They were on the pebbled pathway of the second terrace in the villa garden. It was late afternoon, another cloudless day. A small waterfall trickled over stones beside them. Day shift Assassins were in various stages of sprawl all along the terrace. Half of them had abandoned their coats and ties. Several had fashioned hats out of old paper they'd rustled up in the guest house.

            Vetinari was relaxed in a chair, enjoying  the shade of a large umbrella stuck in the lawn. He was still wearing his normal black robe but his sleeves were pulled up to his elbows. His face showed a hint of color that wasn't there when he spent his days in the Oblong Office. 

            He was quite in agreement with Hanna. Chess _was_ a boring game. It was impossible to discuss things with the figures over dinner or send an agent to find out where their children went to school. But Khavos didn't have much in the way of entertainment. Chess was better than nothing. Vetinari beat Hanna at the game with unfailing regularity but at least it was entertaining to see her frustrated. That day, though, she only agreed to play on one condition: He had to participate in a little game of her making. 

            She stood up and clapped her hands. A few moments later, the servants shuffled up with a long table that they set in the path nearby. Eleven glasses sat on the table. They were filled with water. There was also a large platter covered with a cloth, which Hanna fetched and set on the game table after the chess board had been removed. 

            "The game," she announced, "is Self Control."

            The Assassins stirred.

            Vetinari's powers of self control were legendary. When normal people allowed their eyelids to drop involuntarily every few seconds to moisten the eyes, Vetinari could halt the reflex altogether if a long, icy blue stare was required as a scare tactic in his (former) work. It was said that he once out-stared a _picture_ of a snake. The absurdity of this pleased him so much that he never denied it. 

            He'd given up using the stare on Hanna because she always spoiled the effect by saying in an exasperated tone, "You're forgetting to blink again, your lordship."

            "I am capable of self control, your lordship," she said.

            "Ah. You showed a great mastery of the self when you screamed at the top of your lungs after the Palace Trainer released the bridle of that horse last month."

            "I'd never been on one before! Besides, it was going too fast and--"   

            "I also recall that little embarrassment at the pageant of the Guild of Vintners when, after watching the men dance in suits made of wine leaves, you said loudly: 'We don't get that class of pervert in _my_ guild.'"

            Hanna laughed. "Don't exaggerate. I whispered that to you. And it _was_ pretty funn--"

            "And we dare not forget the time when you consumed three mixed drinks of unknown content and then slid down the stairway banister during the Watch Ball at the Ramkin house."

            "I wouldn't have done it if a certain Patrician hadn't expressly forbidden me to do it. I can't be your obedient servant all the time, can I?"

            Vetinari looked surprised. "My goodness, did I just hear you say the word obedient? Marvellous. Perhaps one day you'll learn what it means."

            The Assassins followed the conversation like an audience at a tennis match. They had the sensation that what they were watching was theater. Except that everyone knew Lord Vetinari didn't hold with that kind of thing. And Hanna. Well… The Assassins reckoned that even somebody who'd seen Vetinari in his underpants shouldn't be allowed to talk to him like that.

            "I won't lose this game," she said.

            "I do hope not. That look you give me when you lose at chess breaks my heart." He fixed her with a gaze that had made people in Ankh-Morpork wonder if he _had_ a heart. 

            She pointed a finger at him. The Assassins looked at each other warily. Finger pointing was a risky business with Vetinari.

            "In a few minutes that arrogant smirk will be wiped off your face, sir."

            "Arrogant? Moi?" Vetinari turned an innocent gaze to the cloudless sky. "I? Smirk? Dear me, you have formed a false impression of my character, Hanna."

            "Are you ready?"

            "Please."

            She waved at the Assassins. "Come on, lads, have a look. This'll brighten your day."

            The Assassins clustered around the table. She lifted the cloth. Two glass bowls sat on the platter, one full of what looked like small, slightly slimy red vegetables shaped like elephant trunks with knobs on the end. The second bowl was empty.

            "These, as I'm sure you've guessed, are Ephebian Fire Peppers."

            Lord Vetinari recognized them, of course, though he had succeeded in living nearly fifty years without eating them. He was not a spicy food kind of person. 

            "This is how it works," said Hanna. "We all alternate eating peppers." She pointed to the table where the glasses were set up. "There's the water. The last one of us to grab a drink wins." 

            She grinned up at the Assassins. They were looking worried.

            "I do expect you all to play along. It'll be fun."

            Kinsey scratched his head. "I don't think we--"

            "I insist, Mr. Kinsey."

            "Yes, miss, but--"

            "Miss Stein insists," said Lord Vetinari, "and believe me, gentlemen, it is useless to resist her. I have one year, six months, one week and three days of experience to back me up."

            "I understand, sir, but…" Kinsey surveyed the doubtful looks on the faces of his shift. "Are those things safe?"

            "The cook washed them, I'm sure," said Hanna.

            Vetinari stroked his beard for a long moment. "I appreciate your attempt at livening up the island, Hanna, but it does occur to me that this game has no intellectual or strategic value whatsoever."

            "Don't think you can wriggle out of it that way."

            "I do not wriggle. I am merely making an observation."

            Hanna held up one of the peppers and turned it in the sunlight.

            "There's an Ephebian saying: Paradise started with the pepper. It grows in the ur-gardens on the edge of the desert scrublands. The nomads who eat them swear that the only way to cool the body is to heat it like the sun. You've told me that self control is the root of your coolness, but my dear," she smiled slyly at Vetinari, "I know that your powers fade when you're confronted with _real_ heat."

            Several Assassins swallowed hard. A few shuffled a step or two away from the game table. It was her voice. She had this thing she could do with her voice. There weren't just layers of innuendo; there were mine shafts. It was a voice of dark, pleasant doings in private. None of the day shift Assassins could afford Hanna before she became Lord Vetinari's private seamstress, but they were beginning to see how she'd hooked him. The hooking had actually happened the other way around, but the Assassins didn't need to know that.

            Vetinari blinked. "Hanna?"

            "Yes?"

            "It occurs to me that these peppers may have some effect on the digestive system."

            "Games without risk are boring. Thus, chess." Hanna smiled. "To be fair, I'll even volunteer to go first. You second, then our fine guards, here." She nodded around the group of Assassins, who were looking worried again. "Are we ready?"

            She selected a pepper from the bowl, held it up for all to see, and inserted it slowly into her mouth. She was using a special technique, her lips puckered, the pepper sucked in at increments with her lips. Some of the Assassins were suddenly very thirsty indeed. She removed the stem of the pepper and set it in the empty bowl. She swallowed and licked her lips.

            "Mmmmm," she said. "Delicious. Your turn, your lordship."

            Lord Vetinari reached for a random pepper and bit it firmly and efficiently off the stem, which he set in the bowl. He chewed without any noticeable reaction to what he was eating, swallowed, and shrugged.

            "You implied this was going to be a challenge."

            "Just wait. Your turn, um…Mr. Foster."

            The unfortunate Assassin named Foster had come to the island because his girlfriend had left him for the vice president of the Guild of Actors and he wanted to forget everything that had to do with women. He wished he hadn't just seen Ankh-Morpork's most prominent seamstress put a long item with a knob on the end into her mouth. 

            He reluctantly took a pepper. It wasn't so bad, he decided as he chewed. A bit spritzy, slightly oily, but otherwise…

            He tossed the stem into the bowl.

            …and coughed. The other Assassins watched him carefully like miners observing the canary. He coughed again. It felt like someone had rubbed sand paper across his throat. He doubled over, his hands on his knees, and breathed. 

            "Very good!" said Hanna. "Who's next?"

            The Assassins weren't lining up for the privilege. Vetinari waved at a short one with cauliflower ears, who snatched up a pepper, ripped it with his teeth off the stem and tried to swallow it without chewing. He thought it was a clever thing to do.

            It wasn't.

            A minute later he was sprinting down the garden steps and fumbling with the belt on his trousers. Hanna counted him out though he hadn't drunk any water.

            Most of the Assassins got through the first round, though by the time Kinsey swallowed his pepper, they were standing around with their tongues hanging out and gazing with longing at the water glasses. The peppers had a delayed effect.

            When Hanna's turn came up, all eyes were on her. She selected another pepper, an especially big one with an especially knobby knob on the end, settled back in her chair and looked like she could take all the time in the world to brush the pepper across her lips. And take a long, luxuriant lick around the stem. And enclose it in her mouth, and take it out as if she had second thoughts.

            The Assassins, with the exception of Kinsey, were practising meditative breathing. Vetinari looked like he was observing the speaker at a mildly interesting lecture. Kinsey frowned with disapproval.

            Hanna finally slipped the pepper into her mouth and held it there without biting it. Then she slowly rotated it by pinching the stem in her fingers. The Assassins winced. Vetinari put a hand over his mouth.

            She set the stem in the bowl. The Assassins noticed that a sheen of moisture had developed on her forehead. It made things worse. 

            Vetinari casually ate his second pepper. He wasn't sweating anywhere anyone could see. 

            None of the remaining Assassins survived the second round. Foster was the first to dive for the water glass. One of the younger Assassins emptied his glass, didn't find it enough, and stretched out under the water fall, his mouth open. Another with an especially low pepper tolerance ripped off his shirt as he sprinted down to the beach and threw himself into the ocean for a cool down. Kinsey bowed out gracefully, though he did take a third pepper and sat on a terrace rock, admiring its color in the sunshine. A servant was sent for more water, and the rest of the Assassins sprawled out on the lawn, panting up at the sky.

            After his fourth pepper, Lord Vetinari, his face slightly red, unfolded himself from under his umbrella. He fetched a water glass and held it up.

            "Victory, Hanna. I congratulate you on your very special skills." He took a sip and eyed her over the lip of the glass. "You never cease to surprise me."

            He set a water in front of her but she pushed it aside, closed her eyes and tipped her head to the sun.

            The game _was_ self control, but it meant different things to different people. For  Vetinari, it wasn't whether he could eat the peppers. It was whether he could watch Hanna eat them without cracking a smile. For the Assassins, it wasn't about the peppers either. It was whether they could maintain their…_dignity_…while watching Hanna eat them in her own special way in the presence of the former Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, a lord who didn't need his office to maintain an aura of polite threat. 

            In his short note to Hanna, Vetinari had instructed her to find creative ways to use her Seamstress Guild skills to their advantage. He hadn't expected this. 

            He'd also written a thing or two about theater. All the island was a stage, and they the players on it…

            She unfurled a red fan and fluttered it as she lounged in her chair, her face still turned to the sun.

            "Cooling down, your lordship?" 

            "My dear Hanna, I was never warm."

            They smiled at each other.


	7. VII

**Hola! I'm back from sunny Spain, posting updates again. Glad you're liking the story so far, and a special welcome to **LadyRhiyana**, **lobster johnson, Arch, starmouse** and other newbies to the Hanna-Havvie series.  (*smile*)

VII.

            In the Oblong Office, the Patrician Lord Downey read the dispatch a second time in case he'd misread it. Standing before his desk was his head clerk, Lercaro, lately of the Assassins Guild, who had transitioned smoothly with his master to the Palace and now held what had been Drumknott's position. He had delivered the dispatch Downey eyed with a certain amount of doubt. It was a report from Kinsey about Vetinari's daytime activities  during the previous week.

            7_ a.m. Breakfast with Miss Stein_

_            8 a.m. Walk in garden alone or read_

_            9 a.m. Write or walk island alone with notebook, taking flower or rock specimens_

_            Noon. Organization of specimens_

_            1 p.m. Small lunch alone or siesta_

_            3 p.m. With Miss Stein, afternoon spent on the beach in…_

            Downey looked up at Lercaro.

            "This was correctly decoded?"

            "Yes, sir."

            "You're sure? Absolutely sure?"

            "It was Mr. Kinsey's exact choice of words, sir. I am one hundred percent certain."

            Downey re-read the entry for 3 p.m.

            "What do you make of it?"

            "Couldn't say, sir."

            Downey huffed a moment, scribbled a reply and handed it over.

            "Send this to Townsend." 

            "Yes, sir." Lercaro tucked the message into a pocket. He set a small stack of thick, creamy paper on the desk. Downey pushed it aside.

            "I haven't finished the other things you brought! I'll read it later."

            "You might want to read it now, sir."

            "Don't go telling me what I do and do not want, Lercaro. You're speaking to the Patrician, you know!"

            "Of course, sir, but… I found it misfiled. Now that I think about it, it might have been purposely misfiled."

            "What do I care about a misfiled report?

            "It's not a report, sir."

            Grumbling, Downey pulled the first sheet off the stack and glanced at it. The irritation instantly drained from his face. He reached for the rest of the papers and flipped through them greedily. 

            "Did you read this, Lercaro?" 

            "Just the start, sir."

            Downey settled back in his chair and read through the papers quickly, beginning at the beginning: _Exclusivity Agreement. Parties: Lord Havelock Vetinari, Patrician and Hanna Louria Stein, Seamstress. Contract length: Three years. Terms as follows…_

            When he was finished, Downey was grinning.

            "This is gold, Lercaro. Gold." He shook his head. "He's paying her a small fortune. I wonder if she has something on him." 

            Lercaro coughed into a hand. Downey thought about what he'd just said, and laughed.

            "Believe me, she's not worth this much. She's worth a lot, but not this." He turned to the first page again and stared at it for a moment. The smile widened. He inked a quill and scribbled off a short note, which he folded and handed to Lercaro. "Send it to Miss Stein. By messenger, not clacks." He handed Hanna's contract to Lercaro. "Keep this safe. And get Mr. Slant. I want to talk to him."

            Downey gave a contented sigh. He was feeling very clever. 

            "There are some gentlemen waiting outside to see you, sir."

            "I haven't had a moment's peace all day. Tell them to come back after lunch."

            "They're rather important, sir. The ambassadors from Ephebie, Klatch, Istanzia and some countries I hadn't heard of until last week."

            "What do they want?"

            "They are apparently upset about the debt situation, sir. They insist that calling in their debts will cause a fiscal crisis."

            "For them," said Downey.

            "Would you like to see them, sir?"

            "All right. Send them in."

            Downey leaned back in his chair and smiled. He was feeling very patrician-like at the moment. A word from him and there was fear of fiscal crisis in countries on the other side of the Disc. It was all more work than he rather liked to do, of course, but he left a good deal of the minutiae to Lercaro, who was a thorough lad, no denying it. He'd found the contract between Hanna and Vetinari, a most interesting document that Mr. Slant of the Lawyers Guild will be very interested to see. With the clerk doing the mucky jobs, Downey focused on the important things. Ruling. He'd enjoyed the reception the previous night when Lord Rust was forced to walk behind him. He was first among, well, not among equals, but among others not far below him on a strict hierarchy. He was important. Called upon. Looked to. It was the power equivalent of a windmill. Heading the Assassins Guild had been like a ladies fan.

            When the office door opened, the smile was still fixed on Downey's face.

            A half hour later, there was no trace of it.

**

Detritus didn't think fast but sometimes he thought deep. It was not a coincidence, he decided when he lumbered into the Octarine Parrot, the most popular troll bar in the city, that one of the papers in his stony fist had been received by Strata, unofficial leader of the troll community, a day after Detritus had told Vimes about how trolls were feeling about Downey. This was first level academic thinking for Detritus. 

            The Parrot was packed on Friday night with trolls seeking a moment to relax, loosen the loin cloth and put their feet up after a hard day's bouncing at night clubs, heaving heavy merchandise onto ships or collecting from people not smart enough to pay their debts. It wasn't a fancy place, the Parrot. Rows of rough benches, a shabby stage for the lounge singer and a bar serving the kinds of drinks trolls could get into (dark green with a mossy aroma, powerful enough to knock a human flat by the smell alone). There were a couple hundred packed in that night from every part of Ankh-Morpork's troll society.

            Detritus was well known. Not well-liked, being a watchmen, but well known. He got greetings and slaps on the back and a drink was shoved into his hand. He set it aside.

            "Dere's someding I got to tell you!" he bellowed. It was summer, and the heat was having an effect on the speech of all trolls. Give them cool mountain air and they could spew Huel sonnets. The hot dampness of Ankh-Morpork overheated troll brains. Articulation was right out.

            There was sudden silence. The lounge singer put her fists on her hips.

            "Wat you doin? I got song."

            Detritus stepped onto the stage. He was still in his watch uniform, which meant that he was wearing a helmet. Armour was not necessary, though he did wear a loin cloth. The badge he'd had carved into his arm would have had to be removed with a sanding machine.            

            "Trolls! A message from Strata!"

            The silence thickened. Strata was a female troll of indeterminate age who was at least nominally respected by every troll in the room. She was something of a recluse and had developed her reputation through word of mouth and written letters, speeches and pamphlets passed around to the increasingly literate group. Very few trolls had ever seen her. Detritus was one. She'd wanted to meet the first troll watchman.

            He eyed the paper, waiting for the letters to form themselves into something he could read to the crowd. It took too long, so he relied on memory.

            "Strata says trolls stop working," he said.

            There was a rush of mumbling and choruses of "Wat?"

            "Stop working," Detritus repeated. "Strata says Downey send a letter. Says trolls not loyal. Says trolls should go back to de mountain."

            "WAT?"

            There were scuffs. Benches tipped backwards as trolls moved faster than they normally did, fueled by anger.

            "Dat wat it say?" said a troll in the first row.

            "Dat wat it say," said Detritus.  

            "Strata say dat?" asked another.

            "Strata say dat," said Detritus. He sounded all the more convincing since he didn't know of Rufus Drumknott and his talent for what could politely be called "reproduction," but under usual circumstances was labelled "forgery." Downey's handwriting was easy once Drumknott got the arrogant flourishes right, and Strata wasn't sophisticated enough in handwriting analysis to tell the difference anyway.

            Detritus tried to remember that other thing he was supposed to say. What Vimes told him about that morning. 

            "Trolls!" he called over the noise. "We make signs! We carry dem to de Palace! We MARCH!"

**

            Kinsey and Townsend leaned against a large volcanic boulder in the shade of a broad-leafed palm tree, Downey's note tucked into an inner pocket of Townsend's black suit coat. He'd shown it to Kinsey and a discussion had started up.

            "I told you it was the wrong wording, Mr. Kinsey."

            "Seemed right to me, Mr. Townsend." 

            The Assassins paused to observe Vetinari and Hanna on the black sand beach about twenty feet away. 

            "What would you call it?" asked Kinsey.

            "Certainly not…" Townsend mimicked Kinsey's slightly lilting voice. "3 p.m. With Miss Stein, the afternoon spent on the beach in a state of _frolic_. Of course Lord Downey would be suspicious. Frolic begs for an explanation."

            "It looks like frolic to me."

            "Lord Vetinari doesn't frolic, Mr. Kinsey."

            "What does it look like, then?"

            They fell into silence. The massive leaves of the palm nodded in the breeze and the waves grew milder as the afternoon wore on.

            "That's not frolic," said Townsend. "That's the building of a sand castle."

            "It looks like the Palace, doesn't it? It has little gates and that trench is like the Ankh. See? It fills up when the tide comes in."

            Townsend lit a cigarette and smoked it. He lit another. After awhile, butts were sprinkled across the sand at the foot of the boulder.

            "I admit, I never expected to see him wear something like that," he said. "A man goes through life wearing perfectly serviceable black and now this."

            "At first he frolicked in black," said Kinsey, "but I think he found it impractical. The robes, certainly. Hems getting wet all the time, sand and heat retention."

            "But stripes?"

            Kinsey shrugged. "Looks comfortable, serviceable and sporty."

            "Lord Vetinari doesn't wear stripes, Mr. Kinsey."

            "The straw hat suits him, I think. The corks give it a flair."

            Townsend raised an eyebrow at Kinsey, then turned back to watch Vetinari and Hanna abandon the sand palace for a wade in the surf. More cigarette butts fluttered to the sand, joined by an increasing heap of spent matches.

            "He does seem to be enjoying himself," admitted Townsend. "Has he ever laughed like that in public? Seems to me he should have the decency to suffer in exile."

            "Why shouldn't he laugh? He doesn't have to work, has a private tropical island, an ocean, a beach and a woman a decade younger than him wearing enough fabric for a small handkerchief, which by the way I find quite distasteful, though I realize _some_ men may find it interesting." Kinsey sniffed.

            Townsend, a man who found Hanna's choice of beach wear quite interesting, peered at Kinsey over his cigarette. 

            "Lord Vetinari doesn't laugh, Mr. Kinsey."

            Vetinari sounded like an opera tenor laughing on stage. It carried over the sound of the waves rushing to fill the Ankh he'd cut into the black sand, next to the black Palace. 

            Another cigarette was discarded by Townsend, another lit up. And another. There were piles of dark brown paper at his feet. A breeze stirred them, scattering them across the sand.

            "He can't keep his hands and…such…off of her," he said. "A lord his age. And in public." He shook his head and tried to look away but failed completely. "Shocking, Mr. Kinsey."

            "Not so much, Mr. Townsend. After swimming in the ocean, one does acquire a crust of salt on the skin, even on the stomach."

            "It's undignified. Look at him! A Provost…"

            "Former Provost--"

            "…of the Assassins Guild just…sprawled out like that on the sand with a seamstress."

            From their perches in trees and on rocks along the beach, the majority of day shift Assassins imagined how nice it must be in the afternoon heat to be sprawled out on the sand with a seamstress. None of them particularly disliked Lord Vetinari; guarding him was a job. But lately, he'd become the object of very pointed glares. Hanna was the only desirable woman on an island with nineteen men. Vetinari didn't have to rub it in.

            Burnt bits of brown cigarette papers at Townsend's feet were joined by new ones. He was now smoking only half of the cigarette and dropping everything, tobacco and all before lighting a new one.

            After a while he asked, "Is Miss Stein usually so…merry during the day?"

            "What do you mean, Mr. Townsend?"

            "The…er…giggling."

            "Oh, that. It's probably just his lordship's beard. A beard can be ticklish, especially on the skin of sensitive areas of the body such as the stomach."

            Townsend glanced at Kinsey.

            "So I've been told," Kinsey said hastily.

            In a little while, Townsend was only managing a few puffs from his cigarettes before allowing them to drop from his lips. Without letting his eyes leave Vetinari and Hanna, he rummaged in his jacket for a pack he hadn't yet transferred to his silver monogrammed cigarette case. The pack found, it promptly slipped from his fingers.

            Kinsey gasped. "My, my, my. Wasn't _that_ interesting, Mr. Townsend?"

            "Nobody slaps Lord Vetinari," said Townsend, swiping up his cigarette pack as quickly as possible so as not to miss anything. "Just wait, Mr. Kinsey. He's going to do something unpleasant to her. After he stops that with her ear…and finishes untying her…er…"

            Townsend ran out of matches.  

            "It's a trick," he said breathlessly.

            "A trick, Mr. Townsend? As in, that is not really Lord Vetinari pawing a seamstress on the beach, it is someone who looks exactly like him wearing a blue and white striped bathing costume with a bloody great grin on his face."

            "It's a trick," Townsend insisted. "He wants us to _think_ he's frolicking. It's part of his grand plan."

            "In what way would the appearance of frolic be part of a grand plan?" asked Kinsey. "Wait. I've got it. With sun tan lotion he's drawing a sketch of the ship on Miss Stein's stomach that he will use to escape from the island. It will be invisible until she tans enough for the paler lines to be revealed."

            "Your sarcasm is not appreciated, Mr. Kinsey."

            "He's frolicking."

            "It's a trick."

            They watched. A good deal of wriggling and squealing from Hanna. Roving hands belonging to Lord Vetinari.

            The sun began to set. The beach grew quieter.

            "All right. That looked like frolic, I grant you," said Townsend.

            "I told you."

            Townsend lit a cigarette and wondered how he would compose his clacks message back to Downey. "Who was to know he had it in him?" he asked.

            "Certainly not me," said Kinsey. "I was wondering something else, though, Mr. Townsend. Why doesn't the day shift get extra pay? As you've seen here today, we _do_ have the more unpleasant duty."

            It was true. There _was_ a trick. There always was.

            Vetinari had been frolicking not because of a new found interest in getting sand in his shorts. His lifetime ban on sunshine was not given up because he admired the golden brown tint Hanna managed to get once her bruises healed. 

            It was also true that he couldn't keep his hands off of her. It was not due to the inconvenience of their enforced separation nights.

            When the Assassins looked with shock and envy at what Vetinari was doing with his hands, they weren't paying attention to what he was _really_ doing with his hands.

            Flashback to just before Hanna slapped him. What looked to the Assassins like Vetinari taking a culinary interest in the salt crust that had developed on Hanna's stomach was actually Vetinari speaking softly, repeating certain words while at the same time, repeating a series of taps and brushes of his fingers on her skin. The letters he tapped out formed words. P.i.g.e.o.n.8.p.m.u.n.d.r.e.s.s.2.n.d.t.e.r.r.a.c.e. 

            Communication was important, the exchange of information and ideas. With the surveillance on them at all times, speaking could only convey the information they wished the guards and servants to hear. What they didn't wish them to hear had to be expressed in a different way. Something silent, reliable, but which left no trace, as notes, even coded ones, would. 

            Vetinari was well read. Soon after settling on the island he'd decided to try out a method of communication he'd learned from a book about the education of blind deaf-mutes he'd read years ago. Hanna learned the code of taps and brushes quickly, but especially well under a system of physical reinforcement – positive and negative -- which seemed to focus her mind while serving as distraction for the guards. Caresses, tickles, kisses, pinches, scratches, she was rewarded when she identified a coded message correctly and punished in small, irritating ways when she didn't. She slapped Vetinari lightly out of frustration after a series of punishments. He used it as an excuse to whisper in her ear a few instructions. 

            The waves in the afternoon and early evening grew milder but still served their purpose. To obscure his voice, leaving the Assassins hearing only murmurs – Of pleasure? Passion? – beneath the rush of the water.


	8. VIII

**Ah, yes. Napolean. My favorite dictator banned to an island…until Vetinari. The story continues…**

VIII.

            The pigeon landed on a chimney at the Ramkin-Vimes House, noticed the man in black just below her and decided to take the dirty way in. She went down the stack, fluttering her wings in distaste at the slightly sooty walls, and emerged in the bedroom.

            It was dark and silent. Deep snores came from the four-poster bed.

            The bird flew to the top of one of the posts and cooed.

            Sam Vimes went from snore to wide awake in a split second, a truncheon gripped in his hand.

            The pigeon cooed again.

            "Sybil!" whispered Vimes. He shook her. She was a deep sleeper. "Sybil!"

            She emerged slowly and snapped awake when she saw him on his knees, which never happened under any circumstances because of the symbolism of it and the fact that his knees weren't what they used to be. She followed his gaze.

            "Is it Alice or Reginald?" she asked.

            "Are you Reginald?" Vimes asked the bird.

            She didn't move.

            "Alice?"

            She cooed.

            "That's our bird." Ex-Corporal Littlebottom had told him Reginald and Alice were the smartest young pigeons on the Watch. "Come on down, then." Vimes held out his arm.

            Alice fluttered down and allowed him to unbuckle the burden she'd been carrying on her leg the past thousand miles, over water mostly, with occasional stops on fishing boats and tankers along the way. Sybil got a candle and matches and went into the walk-in wardrobe where there were no windows. Vimes set Alice down and the Ramkins shut themselves up in the closet.

            After a few moments, he said, "What the bloody hell is that supposed to be?"

            "It's a code, Sam."

            "I know it's a code. He knows I don't like codes."

            Sybil sighed. "I'll get paper and pencil."

            They worked on it for several hours, dropping crumpled paper on the floor of the wardrobe. When they cracked it, knew they'd really got it, they were both stretched out on the floor, suddenly excited after the fatigue of the work. The words were revealed slowly, out of order, so that in the end they had to go back to the start and read it all the way through.

            Then they read it again.

            Then they looked at each other.

            "Is it just me, or does it sound like he's enjoying himself?" said Vimes. "Only he would enjoy himself in exile."

            "I do hope Hanna brings that -- What was it called? Bikini -- when she comes back. I would love to see what kind of clothing Havelock would find important enough to mention in a coded message."

            "Doesn't sound like there's much to it," murmured Vimes, rolling up the decoded message. He held the original over the candle flame until it curled away in black fragments. "Buggy said he'd show up at nine."

            "Ten."

            "Right." Vimes started writing on a blank sheet of paper. "Queen Molly is going to love this."

**

            The messenger arrived with the supply ship around midday, when Lord Vetinari was in the study working on his political treatise and Hanna was stretched out on the couch attempting to embroider a handkerchief. She wasn't good with a needle and thread despite the name of her guild, but she was willing to learn. The terrace doors were open and a couple of day shift Assassins were reading in the shade, within earshot.

            "Erghehem!" coughed the messenger.

            They all looked up from their work. The messenger waved a folded letter.

            "Message from the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork!" Downey had told him to announce it that way and to observe Vetinari's face at the same time. 

            It didn't budge. He gave the messenger a long, bland stare.

            "Nice house you got here," said the messenger, looking around. The study was blue and had wooden shutters. He liked wooden shutters.

            "I'm delighted you like it," said Vetinari. "If you would be so good as to deliver the message." He held out a hand.     

            The messenger went straight to Hanna.

            "I've heard a lot about you, miss. No chance on a courier's pay, but I was thinking some time you should offer, like, discounts. For the middle class. It don't seem right letting the nobs have everything."

            "I'll think about it," said Hanna.

            The messenger shook a finger at her. "You can't forget where you come from, miss. The middle class, we got to stick together." He shot a glance at Vetinari, leaned over and whispered, "You can only trust your own. And that's a fact." He straightened up, suddenly official again. "Here's your message, miss."

            Hanna looked over at Vetinari. He was frowning.

            "Good day to you, miss," said the messenger, bowing. "And you too, sir," he said with less enthusiasm. He backed out the door.

            Lord Vetinari propped his elbows on the table and pressed his fingers to his lips. Hanna hesitated, then broke the seal and unfolded the paper.

            A moment later, she started laughing.

**

            The accountant had been talking for ten minutes without seeming to take a breath.

            "…which has called off all trade treaties and imposed prohibitive tariffs on wool, cabbage, corn and wheat, which is likely to cause a food shortage in the city if the situation doesn't change by winter."

            The Patrician Lord Downey stared at him, his hands limp on his desk in the Oblong Office. The past weeks had been enlightening. A half dozen countries had protested the calling in of their debts. When shouting didn't work, they sent papers with official looking seals declaring trade treaties cancelled and protective tariffs in force for a wide range of goods. The latest was from the Sto Plains. The accountant was informing Downey that the price of all fresh grains and vegetables had jumped by ten percent as soon as the news broke that morning. 

            Nobody looked like they were going to pay their debts.           

            "Klatch has threatened to boycott Morporkian goods," the accountant was saying. "Representatives of several of the leading city manufacturers and the appropriate guild heads are waiting outside to discuss the issue with you, sir."

            "Discuss," said Downey.

            "There may be shouting, sir."

            "I've been shouted at for days!"

            "I beg your pardon, sir, but I did advise you against this course."

            Downey sighed in frustration. "What other course do I have?" 

            The accountant removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Taxes, sir."

            Vetinari had taxed the citizens, of course, but only as much as they were willing to give. How he'd found the balance was a mystery. The guilds and nobles had close contact with the Guild of Accountants and usually managed to avoid the worst of it. The Assassins had become good at tax evasion. Now Downey was seeing the issue from the other side.

            "Call off the debt thing and send the Guards out to collect taxes from any delinquents." He thought a moment. "As long as they're not noble. And not from the major guilds. And we'll impose a new tax. Nothing big…" He leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, thinking. He snapped his fingers. "Milk."

            "Sir?"

            "Put a few cents tax on milk."

            "A wise move, your lordship." Mr. Fisk was careful not to smile.

            Downey did. He liked being called wise. 

            "Five cents per gallon. Pocket change. Nobody will notice."

**

            Hanna wiped her eyes with the handkerchief she'd been embroidering, her laughter coming out now in little hiccups. Lord Vetinari's face still hadn't budged. He looked like he expected something unpleasant. The Assassins had set their books aside. The arrival of a messenger was considered entertainment on Khavos. 

            "Oh dear oh dear oh dear," said Hanna. She slumped in the couch, letting the letter flutter to the floor. 

            Vetinari watched it fall but said nothing.

            "Guess what," she said.

            He frowned.

            "Go on, guess." She stretched out on her stomach, her cheek propped up on her hand. "All right, I'll tell you. Downey has informed me that my contract was with Havelock Vetinari, Patrician. And seeing as you're not the Patrician anymore, he found it necessary to declare it null and void. Mr. Slant has apparently confirmed the legal argument."

            Lord Vetinari didn't react.

            "I'm free to go back to Ankh-Morpork or, and this is the really fun part, if I stay, I'm free to offer my services to whomever I wish." She chuckled. "Except for you."

            The Assassins on the terrace looked at each other. Each was mentally adding up his accumulated wages from the past month.

            Vetinari sat back in his chair.

            "It appears you're free at last."

            "Free at last." Hanna turned onto her back and laughed at the ceiling. She was finding it hard to stop. Lord Vetinari had coerced her into the contract, and the only way she thought she would get out of it was for one of them to die or to pay the fortune in penalties required to buy out the remaining time. They were just past the halfway point of the contract. And now she was free. 

            Lord Vetinari got to his feet. 

            "I assume you will decide to go back," he said. "There is no longer a reason for you to guard your investment."

            Hanna tumbled off the couch, caught his hand and held it. "Are you joking, sir? I'm the only seamstress on an island with 18 Assassins; that's a monopoly. The Assassins Guild is our best customer. I'd be a fool to go back."

            The Assassins in the terrace doorway grinned at each other. The assignment on the island just got more interesting.

            Or should have.           

            The Assassins who'd listened in on the conversation between Hanna and Vetinari spread the news to the others. Everyone but Kinsey paid a lot more attention to hygiene the first few days afterward. They were especially nice to Hanna, and she was sweet to them. When one of them got up the nerve to ask her what she was charging these days, she named a figure that was out of the reach of even Townsend, the wealthiest of the wealthy night shift Assassins. Her rates were astronomical. She was asked if she was thinking of lowering them to cover the special economic circumstances of the island. Her fan fluttering in her face, she replied, "Who knows?"

            And that was one of the reasons why the day-shift Assassins huddled together under a clump of palm trees in the terraced garden of the villa instead of doing their jobs. The sun beat down as it had every day the past few long, hot, endless, boring, _aching_ weeks. The men cooked in their dark clothing. The dress code of the day shift had grown consistently lax over time until now most of them didn't bother with jackets, ties, shoes and socks. Kinsey was barefoot. He was wearing a black sleeveless undershirt and had his trousers rolled up to his knees.

            "We have to make an appeal to Lord Downey directly, independently of the night team," he said.

            "He's going to say no," said one of the others. "He has no idea of the conditions here. This dreadful sun."

            "The _heat_."

            "The boredom."

            "Miss Stein."

            The Assassins groaned. There was something humiliating about being unable to pay for the only seamstress on the island. She was like a fata morgana sunning herself on the sand, always out of reach. Kinsey didn't share this sentiment but otherwise he was in complete agreement with his team. The day shift was the hardest and deserved to be compensated accordingly. There had to be some incentive to get to the end of their six-month assignment on the island.

            "I will send a message to Lord Downey with the next ship," he said.

            "Will he even listen?" said the pessimist of the group. "Does he and the guild in Ankh-Morpork really represent us or the night shift?"

            There were grumbles.   

            "We're not nobles," he said. "Just you wait. We'll get the short end of the stick like we always do."

            Kinsey held up a hand. "I am a noble, and I assure you, Lord Downey will play fair with us."

            "You're a _poor_ noble. You need the money as much as we do." The pessimist flipped his thumb toward the guest house where the night shift was. "They all stick together. _Nobles_." He snorted.

            The day shift Assassins stared with narrowed eyes at the guest house. Kinsey was feeling pulled in both directions, which was nothing unusual for him. 

            No one noticed Vetinari release the pigeon Reginald from the roof of the villa.

**

            The night shift wasn't actually sleeping. Townsend had called a meeting. The group lounged on the divans and arm chairs of the living room that faced the sea and drank lemonade served by the housekeeper.

            "We're overqualified for this work," said Townsend. "Any commoner from the Palace Guard could do it. We knew that when we took the assignment, but it has become clear that we should receive additional compensation for the conditions here. A standard of living adjustment."

            "I haven't had a decent massage in ages, Townsend," said one of the Assassins.

            "The cook has no idea how to make a hollandaise," complained another.

            "How dare that bloody seamstress price herself out of the market? She wouldn't do it in Ankh-Morpork, I'll tell you that."

            There was a chorus of agreement. Hanna post-Vetinari obviously thought a tick too high of herself. She barely spoke with her former employer but that didn't stop him from trying to put his hands on her at every opportunity. It was disgraceful. The old lecher couldn't seem to accept the end of the contract. She was nice enough to the Assassins, but when it came to business, she showed herself to be a greedier littler tart than they thought she'd be. 

            "Gentlemen!" Townsend held up a hand. "I am in full agreement. It is insulting enough that we must act like guards and servants, fetching and carrying, receiving wages by the day like common workers. That the comforts in life that we deserve are also robbed of us… It's disgraceful." He brandished a cigarette. "And this! This is the first cigarette in my last pack. The supply ship will not arrive for three days. I am to wait? A Townsend? My family has twenty pages in Twurp's Peerage! Does that count for anything on this gods-forsaken island?"

            NO! chorused the Assassins.

            "Should we have to stand by and watch a scantily-clad seamstress display herself on the beach without the possibility of paying for the amusement we're entitled to?"

            NO!

            "No, indeed. I'll send a message to Lord Downey explaining the situation." Townsend lit up the first cigarette of his last pack. "I am sure he will understand our predicament and compensate us accordingly."

            There were murmurs, slurps of lemonade, self-righteous chewing of cigars. The night shift Assassins were wondering if old Downey would come through. Men got a bit strange when they became Patrician. Vetinari was proof. Since the message from Ankh-Morpork, he'd started taking long, sorrowful walks around the island by himself. Some of the Assassins would have felt sorry for him if they weren't already feeling sorry for themselves.


	9. IX

**Hey **scribbla** – missed you! Welcome to the madness, **Ouatic7**. Always glad to hear that my OC appeals to non-OC readers. **Anna** – have you emailed me before? Got several things from people with versions of the name anna and am trying to figure out if any are you. Again, thanks to all of my reviewers and lurking readers! The best is yet to come! (*smiley-smiley*)**

IX.

            Lord Vetinari had a habit of entering a room silently. Somehow he managed to open and close doors with squeaky hinges without a sound, to cross floors of marble, tile and wood without betraying himself.

            To keep sane during the contract, Hanna kept a secret list of things she couldn't stand about him. He'd seen it of course, and added to it when he noticed she was forgetting to update. Silent movement was in the top five. Updating her list for her was in the top ten.

            So he silently entered her bedroom before breakfast and saw her at the open balcony doors, a mirror in her hand angled to the light. She was picking meticulously through her hair, right at the crown, and by the look on her face, wasn't happy about what she found. Kinsey and two other Assassins were observing from trees within earshot of the balcony. 

            Vetinari watched for a good five minutes before she caught his reflection in the mirror. 

            "I hate it when you do that," she said. "It's bad enough being watched by everyone else."       

            "On the beach you seem quite happy to be watched."

            She went back to looking for grays in her hair.

            "Watching is free. Touching costs."

            "Ah, yes. I've heard complaints about your exorbitant rates."

            "I've decided to lower them."

            With the exception of Kinsey, the Assassins perked up.

            Vetinari smiled. "That may not be quite a wise idea. It would hardly do for you to come down from the exalted fiscal position I've raised you to."

            "I'm tired of sleeping alone and I'm losing money the longer I do." Hanna frowned at herself in the mirror. "The gentlemen should be hungry enough by now. They'll pay the new rates without protest. They'll be high, not exorbitant."

            Vetinari's smile winked out like a spent candle.

            "Surely it would be good to discuss this idea of yours to _cheapen_ yourself, Hanna." It was his warning tone, level one. Gentle, soft and laced with a hint of displeasure.

            "There's nothing to discuss, sir. This is guild business."

            "The guild is not here."

            "I'm not changing my mind."

            "What will you be offering, may I ask? Ten Morporkian dollars for a tryst behind the house?" Warning tone level two, not quite as soft, the displeasure obvious.

            Hanna smirked. "I'm worth a lot more than that and you know it."

            "How easy you find it to be _common_ once again." Level three, the warning tone that had a vague similarity to the grumbling of a wolf. It had silenced many a Council member in the good old days, when he was still Patrician, his power challenged, yes, constantly challenged, but he'd controlled it, kept it in his hands…

            He suddenly snatched the mirror from Hanna and took her wrist tightly. The Assassins leaned out of the trees for a better look.

            "I didn't groom you for a higher duty for 18 months to have you slip back into your old habits," he hissed.

            "I'm not interested in duty. I won't be a slave to it just because you are." She tried to free her wrist but he took her other arm and held it even tighter. He fixed her with a glare that had made people wish the Oblong Office had a privy.

            "You will _not_ lower your rates."

            "You can't order me around anymore. I'm not your seamstress and you're not the Patrician." She matched his glare. "Let go of me."

            He was gripping her right wrist, the hand she'd hurt when she'd punched the wall outside the Oblong Office. Her fingers curled into a fist. The bruises were gone but the hand was weak and with Vetinari's grip…

            There were tears in her eyes.  

            "Let go of me or I'll scream for help," she said quietly. "One of them will help me. Let go." 

            Kinsey, who'd been watching everything with concern, landed lightly on the balcony.

            "This is not your affair, Mr. Kinsey," Vetinari said.

            "I think you're hurting her, sir."

            "Am I? Is that an accurate statement of who is hurting whom, Hanna?"

            She gritted her teeth.

            The other two Assassins slid onto the balcony, their hands ready to unpack the blades they might feel compelled to use in non-lethal but painful ways if the situation escalated. 

            Everyone froze. The silence lasted a full minute.

            Then Vetinari slowly released Hanna. She rubbed her wrist.

            "Get out of my room. _Sir_."

**

            The Society for the Equal Treatment of Species had existed before Downey took power, but now it had a more focused raison d'etre. Spurred on by the trolls and the hairy man with the yellow eyes, the Society launched a massive city-wide campaign to recruit members from all walks of non-human life. This hadn't been easy in the past, since werewolves, vampires, boogeymen and other creatures were not the joining types. Dwarves normally stuck to dwarf-centered associations. The Undead had their own groups too. 

            But now the Society bloomed. The membership doubled based largely on the foot work done by former watchmen who knew the city gossips, the people who'd get the word out.

            _The Patrician Lord Downey is a speciesist! Protect yourself! United we stand, divided we fall! _

In certain neighborhoods, usually ones where few non-humans lived, the Society organized marches with big banners and a healthy amount of shouting and singing. People started getting nervous. Nervous people complained to the Patrician.

            The Society drowned the Palace with pamphlets, recommendations, lists of demands. At the top: Affirm the rights of non-human species. The Society had always been vague on how this could be done and it wasn't any more detailed now. It made Downey's work harder. He was finding it impossible to satisfy them. 

            Getting the Thieves to do something about the Breaking and Entering wasn't going anywhere either. Mr. Boggis, president of the Guild, billowed his cheeks in protest every time Downey brought it up. 

            "A guild member who breaks and enters has the sense to at least _steal_ something," he told Downey. "It is highly offensive that you would think guild men and women capable of forgetting the crux of their own profession!"

            Assassins were being chucked off the Ramkin-Vimes property as fast as Downey could assign them, and there were grumblings among them about his failure to name a replacement to head the Guild. When the officers brought up the issue, Downey made it clear that he was not prepared to support a new Assassins Guild president. If Vetinari could be Provost and Patrician at the same time, Downey could manage more.          

            The legal process against the Stein family breweries was dragging too. It was also having an irritating side effect: Beer prices were rising as the Steins tried to offset the legal costs and pub owners cashed in on the chance that Winkles Brewery, the largest in the city, would be shut down by the Palace. Ankh-Morpork's beer drinkers were not pleased.

            The low-level chaos permeating the city was getting on Downey's nerves. He was having trouble sleeping at night. He was finding it necessary to work when he really wanted to be having tea or escorting a socialite to the theater. 

            The clerk Lercaro appeared in the Oblong Office with a stack of papers.

            Downey glared up at him. "I haven't finished reading what you brought me this morning."

            "I'm sorry, sir. These are all routine reports from those clerks of Lord Vetinari that weren't dismissed. They're accustomed to detail."

            "They lose the forest for the trees." Downey eyed the stacks on his desk. "Just pick out the few most important ones for me." He brightened. "Anything about our Exile?"

            Lercaro handed over two sheets of paper.

            Each was read quickly. Downey was learning the necessity of skimming papers. If he read every word of everything put in front of him, he'd never dig himself out from under the unbearable mountain of information that crossed his desk every day. 

            "What do they think I am, a money tree?" he cried. "Write Townsend and Kinsey that they're to make do with what they have. If Miss Stein gets bored enough she'll lower her damned rates." 

            Downey hadn't admitted it to anyone, but he was annoyed she'd decided to stay on the island. He hadn't been a perfect gentleman when she visited him after the trial, he regretted his behavior now, but he'd once been her top client. Or rather, he'd deigned to allow her to visit him on a regular basis. He could see the upside to re-establishing the connection for the sole purpose of sending Vetinari periodic and very graphic commentary on how her skills had slipped under Dogbotherer's care. 

            But she'd decided to stay on Khavos. It raised his suspicions.

            "Tell them to double the number of house searches. Vetinari's up to something. Sorrowful walks. Pah!" Downey snatched up a random paper from his desk. "And for gods' sake, send another statement out to the trolls. They're valued citizens etcetra. I want them cleared off the Palace grounds." 

            Lercaro slipped out of the office.

            Downey counted to ten, then sauntered surreptitiously up to the drinks cabinet.

**

            The surf roared over the volcanic rocks, brightened by the starry sky and a half moon high on the horizon. Hanna sat on the sand, her knees gathered under her chin, and watched the black waters roll out. And back. Out. And back. She was shivering. She'd just finished her nightly swim.

            A large towel was settled around her shoulders. Townsend sat down beside her.

            "Cigarette?"

            "No, thanks."

            He was about to light it, then had second thoughts. He tucked it in his jacket pocket. 

            The episode between Vetinari and Hanna was common knowledge among the Assassins. There'd been speculation on what drove him to act the way he had. It was uncharacteristic of that iceberg of a man to show his temper that way. A physical altercation. It was almost unheard of.

            After much discussion, the Assassins formed a consensus. They deduced that he didn't want to lose the last thing he had power over. An understandable reaction for a man who'd ruled Ankh-Morpork for fifteen years. It was Kinsey who'd thought up this explanation. He was a sensitive type, and the other men considered him the best for coming up with deep psychological insights. 

            Hanna hadn't lowered her rates after all, and it was clear to the Assassins why. She had a bruise on her wrist.

            "Look," Townsend began, "the fellows, they asked me to come out and tell you that we're sorry we couldn't help you with…" He waved a hand toward the villa. "We have orders. We're not allowed to rough him up. It's either inhume or nothing."

            "I don't want him roughed up. Or inhumed." She sighed.

            "You should be able to lower your rates if you want."

            "I know! If I had the guild here, if I had someone to represent me, maybe I could get justice, but," she shrugged, "there isn't any local Seamstress Guild. I don't really have any rights on this island, do you understand?"

            Townsend nodded. The Assassins had been feeling the same way since they got the message from Downey that all requests for additional compensation were so much hogwash.

            "You could go back to Ankh-Morpork."

            "I could." Hanna pulled the towel closer around her and blinked at Townsend. "Do you think I should?"

            "Kinsey and I sent a report to Lord Downey about what Vetinari did to you. Maybe he'll help you if you go back."

            "Why would he help me? I'm just a seamstress. It doesn't look like he's been doing much for you and you're Assassins."

            The day and night shifts had been feeling this way too.  Downey ordering more house searches but denying them more pay. They refused to do the extra work and had badgered Kinsey into keeping quiet about it. They didn't have to badger Townsend. He was all for less work for the same money.

            Hanna sighed again. "Things are more complicated than they seem, Mr. Townsend. What Lord Vetinari did, that's not really him. In private, he's always gentle and considerate and…"

            Townsend half listened to Hanna talk while slowly inching his way close enough to put a supportive and understanding arm around her shoulders without it seeming too obvious. He nodded every now and then. He made little encouraging noises. 

            "…so I think I have this problem, like maybe you've heard about hostages who end up feeling close to their kidnappers. He didn't kidnap me, but the contract wasn't my choice and I don't _want_ to go back to Ankh-Morpork without him because I--"

            Townsend wasn't listening anymore. He was resolving a conflict going on in his head. He was fifteen years younger than Vetinari, more fit, more handsome, especially now that his tanned face contrasted so nicely with his pale hair and eyes. And he was ambitious. He wasn't on the island for a holiday or for money. He was getting noticed by Downey. 

            Who at the moment wasn't there. Who didn't seem to be listening to the grievances of the Assassins. Hanna wasn't Downey's and she wasn't Vetinari's. Surely after two middle aged men, a man her age would be a welcome change. 

            In the middle of her explanation of why it was so hard to live with a man like Lord Vetinari, Townsend kissed her.

            "Here!" The voice out of the darkness made the word sound like "Heeeyah!" An Assassin materialized. He stomped across the sand and glared down at Townsend.

            "Don't think you're getting around us that way, Townsend."

            "What the bloody hell are you talking about?"

            Other Assassins were coming out of the shadows along the rocks and among the trees. None of them looked happy.

            "You think you're so clever," one said. "Can't pay her fees so you'll see what you can get for free, eh?"

            "That is an unfounded accusation! I was merely comforting Miss Stein in her—"

            "Comforting? You weren't handing her a tea and a hot water bottle, were you?" The Assassin made kissy-kissy noises. 

            Hanna got to her feet. "I'm tired. Thanks for listening, Mr. Townsend. Goodnight, lads." She started up to the house.

            Townsend was left standing on the beach with a half dozen members of the night shift.

            "I would like to make it perfectly clear," he said as he watched Hanna reach the villa, "that each and every one of you is a complete and utter _bastard_."

**

            Reginald the pigeon hadn't flown to Ankh-Morpork at all.

            Normally, homing pigeons knew to fly back to a certain area known as home. It was trained into their internal Disc positioning systems by repetition. But Reginald was smarter than most pigeons. He couldn't read but he had a passive Morporkian vocabulary approaching 200 words. One of them was _turnwise_. Another was _Pseudopolis_.

            He knew that he was to fly turnwise of Ankh-Morpork to the city of Pseudopolis and a certain _house_ in a street that would smell of _narcissus_. _Food_ would be set out on the target _windowsill_.

            He was eating it when the window opened carefully and an elegant lady well past her prime but determined to fight it wrinkled her nose before reaching out and untying the message on his leg.

            Unlike Sam Vimes, Madam Roberta Meserole didn't need pencil and paper to decode the message. She knew the code. She'd taught it to her dear nephew Havelock decades ago. It took her a few moments to read it.

            She strolled back into her study, a tasteful room of green brocade, wrote a short note and gave it to a servant to take to the bank. Outside, Reginald's head was tucked into a wing. Madam gazed out the window toward the sea.

            "Such a long journey for a small bird," she said.

            Reginald cooed softly.  

            Madam sighed and turned back to the study, though she was seeing, really, the entire house. Twelve rooms. Empty, even with the furniture and books and servants and the cat. She had spent a lifetime in various business pursuits the family only spoke of vaguely. Only in the past few years, as the pain in the joints of her curling fingers grew worse and her own image in the mirror gave her a start, did it bother her that she had nothing to show for her work but empty rooms.

            Such sentiment was new to her, a melancholy that champagne only temporarily fought. She spoke of it to no one except the cat. Friends she didn't have; acquaintances she didn't care to complain to. She had never been one for self pity.

            She sighed again, settled back behind her desk and picked up her quill. The pain in her hands was pushed aside. She wrote carefully because it was code and it was for her nephew.

            She wouldn't tell him all the reasons why she wanted him back home in the Winter Palace of Ankh-Morpork. She wouldn't tell him why it was crucial that Hanna Stein – or anyone, really – be with him. She wouldn't tell him what the next twenty years of his life would do to him if he lived that long; he had to learn it for himself. He was already smarter than she had been and perhaps he would continue to be. Perhaps he wouldn't find himself old in an empty house.

            She didn't write any of this.

            She told him only that she was doing all she could to help him.


	10. X

** Yes, Bobbi just came out that way, a bit sad and lonely but still elegant about it. **Anna** – yes, there are plot bunnies. I've actually been waiting for somebody to say – hey, Hanna and Aunti Bobbi appear to have some interesting similarities. Hm... And **byrdgirl** -- no you don't have to wait long. We're entering the end phase, here! Many thanks to all my readers! **

X.

            Lord Downey's carriage stopped up short at the gates of the Palace. On the inside. He was having trouble these days getting out.

            He stuck his head out the window.

            "What is it now?"

            His clerk Lercaro, on the seat above next to the driver, glanced over the assorted characters crowding around outside the gates and tried to decide where to begin. One of the characters did it for him.

            "Tuppence for a cuppa tea, gov'ner?" asked a slimy little man in a drab overcoat.

            He was pushed aside by a smaller man in an even drabber overcoat. "Eightpence for a Meal, mate? Just eightpence. I ain't gonna drink it away. I swears by me old mother."

            There was more shoving. The crowd had the makings of a mob, and an unusually egalitarian one at that. The men who were obviously members of the Beggars Guild practised their profession next to trolls still not pacified by Downey's assurances of their loyalty. A motley group of creatures from the Society for Equal Treatment of Species carried protest signs. Mothers held up babies shrieking, as far as Downey could make out, for milk. Enraged dairymen in white aprons moved nervous-looking cows up to the gates. There were merchants and children and concerned middle-class parents and representatives of  yoghurt, cream and cheese manufacturers. C.M.O.T. Dibbler circulated in the crowd attempting to sell them sausages. Except for the beggars and Society members, the mob shouted in unison:

            DOWN WITH THE MILK TAX!

            The beggars twitched or muttered or shouted or wandered around calling people Jimmy. They'd been at it day and night outside the Palace for so long that Downey had sent an urgent message to Queen Molly, head of the oldest and richest guild in the city, asking her politely why a good number of her membership had formed a drooling, dribbling ring around the Palace grounds. 

            She'd responded that the Beggars Guild was showing its support for the Downey regime.

            Downey had authorized a certain amount of money to be forwarded to the guild in hopes it would make the support less public. It was a form of anti-invitation, one of the ways the guild made its money. It was paid to not have beggars show up at special occasions at respectable households. 

            Queen Molly sent a thank you note. The beggars didn't budge. 

Sam Vimes was paying them not to.

**

            "It is obvious, gentlemen, that the Assassins Guild in Ankh-Morpork is not in a position to represent our interests directly."

            Townsend was burning through his cigarettes like a brush fire. He was speaking to the assembled Assassins – both shifts -- at 4 a.m. in the dining room of the guest house. A passable fish with scalloped potatoes had been consumed and the gentlemen had moved on to cigars, aperitif and coffee.

            The past week, he'd spent his evenings on the beach with Hanna – only talking, of course, since the other night shift Assassins were watching, damn it -- and he'd been thinking over something she'd mentioned to him after one of her swims. The conversation was at first about guilds in general. Then Hanna mentioned the Seamstress Guild had decided to excuse her from paying dues for the duration of her stay on the island, seeing as she was not practising inside the Ankh-Morpork city limits and, by extension, was not benefiting from her guild membership. Seminars, additional training, the Hogswatch dinner, that sort of thing. 

            It seemed sensible to Townsend. He did some mental calculations and discovered that the Assassins were still paying guild dues out of their weekly salaries. It didn't sit well after Downey denied them the standard of living adjustment and ordered men working under unbearable conditions to do yet more house searches. There was no guild rep on the island to appeal to. 

            Hanna had mentioned something else. One seamstress was an independent contractor. Two was a guild. If there had been another seamstress on the island with her, she'd probably form some kind of Seamstress Guild Local that would force the guild in Ankh-Morpork to hear her grievances about the island. 

            A Local.

            It had stuck in Townsend's mind as he went about the business of making sure Vetinari was up to no mischief. If the Assassins formed a Local, it would have a united voice of appeal to the mother guild in Ankh-Morpork. United we stand, divided we fall.

            "I hereby propose," he said, "to form the Assassins Guild, Khavian Local 18."

            "What's the eighteen for?"

            "There are eighteen original members," said Townsend, addressing one of the day shift Assassins. 

            "Do you really think Lord Downey will approve of this?" asked Kinsey.

            "That is the very point, Mr. Kinsey. If we act together as a unit of the Guild, we can more effectively prevail upon Lord Downey to give in to our demands."

            "What are our demands?" asked a night shift Assassin.

            Townsend tipped the ash off his cigarette. "Among other things, a standard of living adjustment for all members of the Local, guild fees adjusted to reflect the lack of benefits on the island, an agreement to--"

            "Before we draw up demands, shouldn't we elect officers?"

            There were mutterings of agreement. Townsend smiled broadly across the table.

            "Naturally, gentlemen, as the originator of the idea I assumed that I would head the Local."

            "I didn't vote for you."

            "Mr. Kinsey for president!"

            "I don't want to be president," said Kinsey, his arms folded.

            "He doesn't want to be president," said Townsend. "Gentlemen, please…"

            A day shift Assassin pointed at Townsend.

            "You're night shift. How do we at the day shift know you'll represent our interests too?"

            "Of course I will." Townsend held out his hands. "All members are equal."

            "Ha! We heard what you tried with Miss Stein. You're a twisty, windy fellow, aren't you?"

            "There should be a vote!" cried a day shift man with an amber pin in his black tie, rather flashy for an Assassin.

            One of the night shift men tossed back his brandy. "Townsend said he'd represent all of us, so calm down please you…ah, yes, by the smell, I remember you're the son of that paper manufacturer. Be a good chap and leave these things to your social betters."

            There was sudden silence in the dining room. The sound of half a dozen knives being slipped out of hiding places in dark clothing of day shift Assassins was not heard. Neither was the removal of another half dozen blades in the hands of night shift Assassins.

            Kinsey didn't know what side he should be on. He side stepped over to Townsend.

            "What if we make the president a rotating office, monthly, say, day shift then night shift and so on?" 

            The Assassins all turned their eyes to Townsend while managing to still look with quiet menace at the rest of the men in the opposite shift.

            Lord Vetinari was smiling. No one was around to see it because the Assassins were experiencing the joys of organized labour, leaving him completely unguarded. He strolled away from the guest house dining room window where he'd spent the last instructive hour in eavesdropping, and went up to the villa.

             It was a bit like the old days at the Palace. He would walk around sometimes nights when every other living soul was asleep and drink in the silence like a crisp, cold glass of water. Nothing stirred in the villa, no sound except for the settling of the house, the ticking of a clock. It was his first night round at the villa with the knowledge that he was not being watched. He was completely alone and it suited him.

            He'd had encouraging reports of Ankh-Morpork from the pigeon post, a system that had been helped along by the embarrassed decency of the day shift Assassins. They followed Vetinari on his solitary walks, but not too closely. Nobody wanted to see the former Patrician, a man brung as low as he'd ever been in his life, turning sorrowful eyes to the horizon, dreaming maybe of what he once was. He usually disappeared into a rocky, cave-like nook on the coast. Now and then, the Assassins heard what they assumed were noises of…sadness… echoing out of the rocks. Vetinari approved of the sensitive nature of the Assassins, and was willing to play act a bit, moaning and sobbing and so forth, to keep them too embarrassed to enter the sheltered rock that Alice and Reginald had been trained to regard as home. Pen, ink and paper, as well as bird food, were stored in the makeshift pigeon post command center. 

            He climbed the stairs to the villa's second floor and soundlessly made his way down the corridor. He assumed the last little stroke prepared with the help of his aunt would end things favourably in Ankh-Morpork. One or two things in her note had been rather puzzling – her tender inquiries about Hanna's, not her nephew's, health -- but it was nothing he needed to mull over at the moment.

            He paused outside the last door in the hall. A pity that he wouldn't be staying much longer. The villa, the island in general, had grown on him. The quiet lifestyle was invigorating. He felt refreshed enough to rule Ankh-Morpork another fifteen years. He intended to thank Downey appropriately for the much-needed rest.

            The door was unlocked. Light from a three-quarter moon cast the furniture into hazy shapes and made the white gauze curtains on the bed glow. Lord Vetinari sat on the edge of the mattress. A hand drifted out of the sheets and pillows and settled on his leg.

            "Are the boys having fun?" asked Hanna sleepily.

            "As much as can be expected. I'm looking forward to their attempts at drafting by-laws."

            She sat up. "They're all at the guest house? We don't have any guards?"

            "None. The servants are sleeping. It is safe to say how pleased I've been with your performance. If I wasn't familiar with your other professional skills, I would think you were in the wrong guild." He clapped his hands softly. "Bra-vo."

            "You're not so bad yourself. Townsend told me about your moaning and groaning in the caves. I wish I could have heard you doing that."

            "I believe you have under different circumstances."

            Hanna laughed into her hand, but Vetinari looked like he'd just announced a budget deficit. Normally, he was not a man to vocalize anything he hadn't thought over in a calm and rational manner beforehand. But under Hanna's influence, he'd found it necessary to spread the word in Ankh-Morpork that any further attempts to create or refine a machine that records sound would be strongly _discouraged_ by the Palace.  

            She held up her wrist. "I'm still not happy about this bruise," she said. "I've been battered around enough since all of this started."

            "Think of it as a dramatic aid. You would not have managed tears without help."

            He patted her hand absently.

            "Now for the next act. Perhaps a reconciliation scene. It should be a touching moment for the audience. We could stage it," he pursed his lips, "in the rose bower…"

            Lord Vetinari had banned street entertainment in Ankh-Morpork, mimes being his particular target. He'd always advertised a dislike for theater in general, though under certain circumstances, he quite liked it. Watching a show was not nearly as interesting as directing one. He was delighted when Downey handed him the island as a colourful backdrop, the Assassins as his audience and the inherent drama of the broken contract with Hanna. It wasn't the real contract, of course, which wasn't stored in Ankh-Morpork at all, but a version Drumknott had misfiled in a superficial way because its surfacing would perhaps come in handy in future.

            Yes, Vetinari's time on the island had turned out to be far more entertaining than he'd expected.

            "That should do," he said when he'd finished his stage direction for the reconciliation act. "You will follow my lead."

            "Don't I always?"

            He didn't mention that she usually needed some convincing. Instead, he nodded, then kissed her. She pulled away.

            "Maybe you've forgotten; we don't have a contract anymore, Havelock." She shook her finger at him. "_Nil volupti, sine lucre_."

            "You mentioned something about lowering your rates."

            "Which you forbade me to do."

            He shrugged and got up to go.

            "All right," she said, smiling. "How much do you have on you?"

            He looked blank for a moment, then reached into his pocket. 

            "It appears to be one Morporkian dollar."

            "Sorry. Not enough."

            "No? Hm." He reached into his pocket again. "Two dollars?"

            Hanna shook her head. Lord Vetinari excavated every pocket in his robe. There was the sound of coins clinking in his hand. He didn't need to look at them to count them.

            "The grand total appears to be 9 dollars and 43 p." 

            "Pathetic. Embarrassing. I'll take it."

            He dumped the coins onto the night stand. "This is a sordid business," he sighed. He began on the buttons of his collar. Hanna climbed out of bed to help him. She didn't bother to wrap the sheet around her.

            "Just like politics," she said. 

            For once, Vetinari had his hands on her without tapping out a secret message. He kissed the bruise on her wrist and said, "What did you think I was talking about?"

**

            The excuse was that the sovereignty of the Seamstress Guild had been violated. Mrs. Palm, president of the guild, had been removed from the City Council before it voted on the last day of Vetinari's trial. To get things stirred up, the rumour also went around that Hanna had been sent into exile against her will and without charges or a trial. Downey's cancellation of her contract with Vetinari was another injustice from the perspective of the Guild.

            They were flimsy excuses for a full-scale action. But the negotiations between the Seamstresses and Vetinari via the pigeon post had yielded an agreement on certain financial matters once he returned to power. In the meantime, the action was to be bankrolled by Madam Meserole. There could be no better war chest. Mrs. Palm went for it.

            The recent activity outside of the palace gates had usually begun at a civil hour, the dairymen and merchants and trolls gathering for another long day of protest after having a hearty breakfast. 

            The seamstresses, so they say, never sleep. Sunrise was around fiveish; the ways in and out of the palace grounds were blocked with seamstresses by the time the city clocks were done striking the hour. 

            They seemed to come in one load, all at once, though that was impossible. Thousands of women couldn't just materialize out of the night, placards, posters and flags in their hands. Yet somehow, they managed to go from nothing to a mob so quickly that the palace guards barely had time to inform the Patrician before the group doubled in size again.

            A woman climbed on top of an overturned crate at the palace gates and spoke into a rolled up newspaper. She'd been chosen for her booming voice.

            "The Ladies of Negotiable Affection of the Seamstress Guild, along with the Lusty Girls of No Vocation, do hereby declare a general strike. No affections will be traded in Ankh-Morpork until the honour of the guild is re-established!"

            There was cheering from the women. There were distressed stares from the palace guards. Chants started up. _One two three four, freedom for your local whore! Five six seven eight, rumpy pump will have to wait!_

            By the time Downey was in his dressing gown looking down at the crowd, it had doubled in size again. Lercaro was at his elbow.

            "Well, well," said Downey. "Another day of chaos in Ankh-Morpork." He frowned at the women gathered below. "Is this a coincidence, Lercaro?"

            "Probably not, sir."

            "Probably not."

            Downey rubbed his eyes but the head ache didn't go away. It couldn't be the three… No, four… Five, was it? Drinks he had last night. It was fatigue. It was impatience. Things weren't calming down fast enough. It was clear why there continued to be such flares of chaos in the city. 

            Well, then. If Vetinari wanted to play the game to the end, Downey was more than willing. Kinsey and Townsend had reported his reaction to the cancellation of his contract with Hanna. Afraid to lose his last bit of power? Well, everyone had to confront their fears some time.

            "I want to see Rosemary Palm first thing," said Downey. "And send a clacks to Townsend. I want Miss Stein shipped out _now_."


	11. XI

** I wasn't going to leave you all too long at a cliffhanger! **Twist**: Brace yourself for this chapter, girl. You might be squealing even more. **Rhiyana**: I kept wanting to type 9 dollars 43 cents, a product of being an Ami in Euroland. And as **Merrymoll** pointed out, the really funny part about that bit (for me) was Havvie looking for spare change. Cheers to **starmouse, lobster, Tindomiel, byrd** and all my readers. **Anna** – Ja, schick mir 'n Email. Ideen sind willkommen –  Ich werde eine Meserole Geschichte bald anfangen, glaube ich.**

XI.

            The reconciliation scene began with an accidental meeting in the rose bower on the villa's second terrace. A strain of yellow roses bred for their late summer blooms twisted up and over a series of arches along the path. It was dusk, the usual time when the day and night shifts met, though there had been a mixing of duties since the creation of the Assassins Guild Local. There was a lot of work to do to get the organization off the ground. 

            Assassins of both shifts sipped mint juleps while strolling through the garden, talking quietly about by-laws and organigrams. Kinsey was in the guest house counting the ballots for president of the Local, and Townsend was monitoring to be sure they were counted correctly. It was the third vote. The other two had been protested. By Townsend. He'd lost them both.

            Lord Vetinari was known for his organizational abilities and had of course volunteered to give any advice the Assassins needed. He was explaining the difference between a vertical and horizontal dues structure when they came across Hanna in the rose bower.

            As far as the Assassins knew, Hanna and Vetinari hadn't spoken with one another in a week or two. The air between them was frozen solid. The Assassins instinctively turned to go down a different garden path but Vetinari remained where he was. He took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly. 

            "This has gone on long enough, Hanna."

            She flipped her fan closed but said nothing.

            "I hoped that we could discuss this like mature adults."

            "I'm not interested." She turned her back on him.

            The Assassins were arrayed within earshot. Lord Vetinari went to them and said, "I would like to ask if you could spare us some privacy. Remain in the garden if you like, but perhaps Miss Stein will thaw if our conversation is kept between the two of us." 

            They could see in his face that he was appealing to them to have some understanding of the situation, step aside and allow him a moment alone with Hanna for the purpose of conversing about Certain Topics. Topics that men hated to talk about normally, often involving too many statements beginning with "I feel…" It would be the Talk. 

            No man confronted with the Talk could bear to have other men around to hear him descend into a morass of emotion. The Assassins understood. They were men too. Who hadn't been there? They stepped aside, out of earshot but within sight of the rose bower. 

            What they saw was a little dance similar to a tango, a struggle between man and woman that went something like this: Hanna kept her back to Vetinari as he talked, then turned to glare at him, and turned away again, taking one step up the path. Vetinari stepped behind her and put out a hand, which she pushed away, taking another step up the path. Vetinari took three steps to get in front of her, his hands held out in appeal. She shook her head. He folded his hands over his heart. She turned away but only half way this time. He stepped toward her again.

            Somewhere in the middle of all this, the Assassins called the servants to bring some snacks. They munched on walnuts and hastily popped corn while they watched.

            The dance continued with Hanna snapping her fan open again and fluttering it high over her face (it was a moment when she couldn't keep herself from grinning; she pushed it down as quickly as she could). She peeked over the edge when Vetinari said something that the Assassins guessed has surprised her. When the fan came down, she looked on the point of crying. The Assassins speculated about what Vetinari had said to get that reaction out of her. Vetinari held out his hand again, still talking quietly, and after hesitating, Hanna took it. They stepped toward each other, Hanna digging a handkerchief out of her sleeve and swiping it at her eyes, Vetinari smiling down at her. 

            The Assassins twittered. They talked with their mouths full. 

            "He's not going to do it."

            "Yes, he is. Go on, sir. Look at how she's looking at you."

            Hanna had her head turned, but was peering sideways at Vetinari in a coquettish way. The Assassins followed every move with intense interest.

            "Come on, show her what's what."

            "What?"

            "You know. Show her…" The Assassin winked at his buddies, then shoved another fistful of popcorn into his mouth.

            "Show her, like, his real feelings? Is that what you meant?"

            "I still don't think he's going to do it."

            "Shut up and watch."

            Vetinari leaned closer to Hanna. They were gazing at each other, a melted butter sort of gaze, it was drippy and sticky and exactly what the Assassins wanted to see.   

            "That's the way."

            "He's going to do it!"

            "No, he isn't."

            "Yes, he is. Come on, sir. You can do it! We're right behind you!"

            "No, we're not. We're--"

            "Shut up and watch."

            The dance ended with Vetinari bending over Hanna in a tango-like dip. There was another long, smouldering look. Then…he kissed her. 

            It was one for the clickers. 

**

            Townsend, who won the third vote for president of the Assassins Guild Local by using targeted bribery, received the clacks from Downey the next day. He took it into the library where Vetinari and Hanna were sorting through books she planned to read. Hanna had asked the Assassins to join her in a book circle for literary discussions.

            After he announced that the Patrician Lord Downey wanted Hanna shipped out,  Townsend watched Vetinari to read his reaction. It was a while coming. Vetinari looked at Hanna for a long time. She was too shocked to say anything.

            "Hm," he said finally. "I can not imagine why Dr. Downey has changed his mind about allowing you to remain. You haven't been doing any mischief behind my back, have you?" He tossed a narrow glance at Townsend, and got to his feet. "It has been a joy, but alas, orders are orders. Will you need help packing?"

            "Your lordship!"

            "The Patrician's orders should always be obeyed." He smile quickly. "You surely know that."

            "I have no choice? No choice at all?"

            Hanna appealed to Townsend, and the look on her face was genuine. She wasn't acting anymore.

            "Lord Downey wasn't making a suggestion, Miss Stein."

            "Oh no. Patricians never make suggestions. There's never a choice, is there?" She started pacing around the library.

            Lord Vetinari watched her stomp back and forth between the reading table and the writing desk. 

            "Perhaps," he said, "you and I could have a word alone, Mr. Townsend."

            Hanna whipped around.

            "You don't understand, sir. I can't go back. Listen to me, he said he'd--"

            Vetinari held up a hand. "If you could excuse us, Hanna. We will sort this out."

            She stared at him. He was infernally calm and had a little smile on his face, a know-it-all, hyper confident smugness that she hated. She trusted him by now, but only so far. A part of her still assumed he'd sacrifice her for his own ends if he saw the need to do it.

            "Fine," she snapped. "Do excuse me, gentlemen." She swept out of the library and slammed the door behind her.

            In the garden she tried to burn away her anger by sprinting up the steps, clear to the top of the highest terrace, where the lily pool was. Dragonflies buzzed over the blooms and in and out of the reeds. The blossoms on the tree at the edge of a vine-covered half wall wilted a little in the August heat. Hanna sat on the stone bench. Shade helped a little. The breeze. The quiet. It wasn't much, it didn't calm her completely. She was still annoyed that Vetinari had pushed her out of the discussions about her own fate after everything she'd done for him.

            And of course, she was scared.

            No doubts were in her mind about what would happen if she returned to Ankh-Morpork without Vetinari and with Downey still in power. She would get a special invitation to the Palace delivered by a couple of grim men in black who would not be so easy to charm as Townsend and the others. There would be questions. Interrogations. It wasn't possible that Downey would leave her alone. He would push her until she told him exactly what had been happening on the island. There was only so much she could withstand. Her chest ached, ghost pain from the wounds Downey had made. They were long gone, but not forgotten.

            She hadn't told Lord Vetinari the details about what happened after the trial but he'd seen the bruises; he surely guessed… 

            It was two months ago now, but the memory was fresh. She'd showed up at the Palace as soon as she'd heard about Vetinari's punishment. Lord Downey greeted her like an old friend, all smiles and dripping politeness, and poured her wine and settled into a sofa in one of the palace sitting rooms. He sighed contentedly. 

            "Well, that's that," he said. "We can't call it official until he's really gone, but we can safely say things are moving in that direction." He looked at the glass in his hand. "Wine. Pah! We should have champagne!" He went to the drinks cabinet and started poking around among the bottles.

            He poured two champagnes and presented one to Hanna with a flourish. 

            "To freedom, my dear," he said, raising his glass. 

            She gave him a cosmetic smile, clinked glasses and drank. 

            "So," he said, "with Dogbotherer out of the way, you don't have to continue that sham of a contract. Terrible of him to coerce you into that sort of thing. It must have been a walk through Hades for you. But joyfully, those days are over. You can void the thing and no one will force you to pay the penalties."

            He drained his glass. "I won't be asking you for a contract myself because unlike our soon-to-be Exile, I respect your desire to maintain your freedom. We can return to the happy days before all of that unpleasantness. I'm planning to throw a party as soon as possible, a bit of a house warming. The Palace needs a good airing out." He chuckled. "I'd be delighted if you would accompany me. Not only for symbolic reasons; I genuinely enjoyed our--"

            "I'd like to go to Khavos too, your lordship."

            Downey had a surprisingly pleasant laugh. He refilled their glasses and laughed and stopped only to take a drink.

            "That sense of humour of yours," he said. "A delight…"

            "I'm serious, sir. I came to ask your permission to go with Lord Vetinari."

             "Don't take that unpleasantness about the breweries and your house so seriously. You'll get your house back after the Council settles down. It's being quite vindictive about Vetinari's extortion. I can barely rein them in." He shrugged. "And your family will be compensated in some way for the breweries, I'll see to that."

            "I'm glad to hear it, sir. I still want to go."

The mirth dropped from Downey's face. He set his glass aside. "He doesn't want you there. If he did, he would have said."

            "I don't care what he wants."

            Downey got up and paced to the window, then circled around again, his arms folded. "This is all very interesting. You want to go to him and he doesn't want you. What am I to think of that?" 

            He paused. "It begs a separate question. Maybe you have the answer. It's been bothering me for a while." He sat again, his hands wrapped around one knee. "A month ago, Vetinari showed up at the Guild and gave up a few privileges he enjoyed as Provost of Assassins. It puzzled me why he did it."

            "I have no idea. He doesn't tell me much."

            "Maybe it will help when I tell you what he wanted in exchange. He requested your Guild contract be set at," Downey raised his eyebrows, "a very surprising amount. He never mentioned it to you?"

            Hanna shook her head. All she knew was that Lord Vetinari had negotiated with the Assassins Guild at the beginning of their agreement to make the cost of inhuming her a bit more frustrating for any would be enemies. As far as she knew, it was at 25 thousand dollars, a very respectable amount, especially for a seamstress. 

            "How much is it?" she asked.

            "You really don't know? Puzzling." Downey's frown deepened. "It now costs 150 thousand dollars to inhume you, Miss Stein. A prohibitive amount. The list of people worth more is quite short and includes only nobles or the extremely wealthy. I couldn't help but speculate why he requested it. The figure can't reflect your value to him, seeing as you're only a seamstress, so I had to come to another conclusion. A rather disturbing one." 

            Hanna was suddenly aware of Downey's hands. They were resting on his wrists in a nonchalant way, but only if you didn't know that Assassins loved to wear daggers just inside their sleeves. She tried not to look obvious when she slid on the sofa cushion away from him.

            "It seems to me," he said, "that this extraordinary level of protection for you was meant to be some kind of reward. I'd been wondering all along what sort of information he'd been getting out of you, and it seems to me, it must have been valuable indeed."

            "All client information is confidential, sir," said Hanna. "Always. I've never said a word about you or anyone else. Not a word."

            "Really? Never? Well." Downey wandered over to the fireplace. "It seems to me that maybe you told him some things you shouldn't have and you'd rather go into exile before any of us find out the truth." 

            Hanna was on her feet and behind the sofa. "I never told him anything, sir. I swear."

            "I'd believe you if it wasn't Vetinari we're talking about." Downey selected an iron poker from the stand next to the fireplace. "Everybody tells him everything. It's very irritating." He set his empty champagne glass on the floor and held the poker in front of it like a croquet mallet. He sighted the door. "The upside about all this is, as much as your inhumation would cost, I have enough money for it, and – this is the truly marvellous part – as an Assassin myself, I can execute the contract as well. It's like having my cake and eating it too." The edge of the poker tapped the champagne glass. "That's not meant to be a threat, Miss Stein. Just keep it in the back of your mind as we _negotiate_ your future."

            The poker impacted with the glass. Shards jumped in the air and shattered into smaller splinters against the door.

            For Hanna, the evening got worse from there. She'd punched the wall outside the Oblong Office afterwards because punching Downey was not an option. She wasn't that tired of her life.

            In the villa garden, she opened her eyes. The dragonflies glided over the murky water of the pond, dipping between the reeds. The sun started setting. She watched the pool and waited until a demonstrative series of footfalls announced the arrival of Vetinari on the terrace.

            "We have reached a compromise," he announced. He sat on the bench beside her. "Mr. Townsend has been kind enough to give us time for a proper goodbye."

            "What do you mean?"

            "He will delay executing the order for another two weeks. He has also agreed to end all surveillance. He apparently needs the time to consolidate his power as head of the Assassins Guild Local."

            "Why would he agree to all that? Did you threaten him?"

            Vetinari leaned back against the wall. "I have no power to threaten here, my lamb. I have only influence. As you have. You've used it beautifully. Mr. Townsend was ready to listen to my suggestions once I outlined to him what you're likely to encounter once you return to the city. He was quite touchingly concerned with your well-being." He closed his eyes and smiled faintly.

            "What will Downey do to him when he doesn't send me back right away?"

            "Ah, that is the advantage of long distance communication. It is quite possible for messages to be delayed. Bad weather at sea, problems with the clacks… So many things can go wrong."

            "It's still a risk." Hanna studied Vetinari's face. He looked pleased with himself. "What did you promise him?" 

            "In case you are wondering, I did not promise him _you_. I confess that viewing you as a commodity has become distasteful to me."

            "The guild trades affections, Havelock, not people. I'm not a slave; I'm not yours to give away."

            "That is not what I meant."

            "Then what did you mean?"

            He looked thoughtful for a moment, then dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. "Mr. Townsend and I reached a different agreement. For the second time in months, we are not being watched. Refreshing, isn't it?"

            The sky had darkened and the stars already shimmered overhead. It was so quiet they could hear the whisper of the tide on the beach. They walked together to the edge of the terrace and looked down over the expanse of gardens. It felt like standing at the top of an amphitheater. The panorama of sand and sea spread out in the distance. 

            "It is beautiful here," he said. "Perfect retirement property." 

            "You'll never retire. Drumknott will find you slumped over some papers in the Oblong Office and they'll bury you with a quill in your hand."

            He put his arm around Hanna's waist. She waited for him to tap a message on her hip with his fingers but he didn't. He just held her.

            "There comes a time," he said, "when our powers fail us whether we like it or not. In some situations, it may be advisable to end the performance before that happens."

            She glanced up at him. He had a faraway look on his face. 

            "Why?" she asked.

            "Hm?"

            "Why end the performance early?"

            "It is a question of whether one walks off the stage or is carried off." 

            "Being carried isn't always bad. It depends on who's arms you're in." 

            Hanna leaned against Vetinari's chest. She assumed correctly that he was smiling. 

**

            Within a week, other guilds were striking in sympathy with the Seamstresses. The Cloth Guild and the Guild of Undergarments joined in, delivering a great blow to the city's ability to get new sheets, corsets and long underwear. The Guild of Hotelliers nearly joined, but instead went to the Patrician to complain about how much money they were losing each day. That began a flood of complaints. Dock workers and sailors showed up right behind the hotel owners, and the managers of adult-oriented bookstores and theaters. Purveyors of fine erotic products also made their voices heard. Sonky sales plummeted. The Carters Guild complained about seamstresses blocking the streets, merchants protested seamstresses hanging out making lewd gestures and comments in the market squares.

            Lord Downey sat at his desk and looked at the mail sacks lying on the floor of his office. They were the kind of burlap things usually reserved for shipping potatoes. There were ten of them.

            "These are all from today."

            "Yes, sir," said Lercaro.

            "Related to the strike."

            "Yes, sir."

            Downey rubbed his eyes and held out a hand. Lercaro handed him a random letter out of a bag. The Patrician handled it with mild distaste.

            _Dear sir, I must protest thee contination of the strike of the hores. Seeing as You are not marreed, You peraps do not no of thee importence of getting thee husband out of thee house sometimes and letting him have his fun. As a propper wife, I have more important things to do then entertane every mood of my husband. For thee sake of marrital harmony, pleese stop thee strike. Sincerest regards, Mrs. Alma Moccasin-Smythe.           _

            Downey set the letter aside. 

            "This is representative," he said.

            "Yes, sir."

            "Even housewives want the seamstresses back at work."

            "It appears so, sir."

            Downey pinched the bridge of his nose. "Remove the rest." 

            He turned again to the reports on his desk, most of them urgent financial estimates of losses should the strike continue. It was surprising what an economic impact the seamstresses had. By Mr. Fisk's calculations, it was a multi-million dollar industry. Not annually. Monthly. The peripheral effects, the ripples into other industries, made the losses even worse.  

            Mrs. Palm had proven herself immovable. Downey had met with her and other officers of the Seamstress Guild three times but nothing had been resolved. It was obvious why. Nothing was stated but Downey was not a complete fool.

            Lercaro returned with the latest clacks messages from around the Disc. The Patrician flipped through them eagerly, then tossed them on his desk.

            "Why haven't I got anything from Townsend?"

            "He must have the message by now, sir." 

            "Send it again."

            Lercaro turned to leave.

            "Wait…"

            Downey looked around the Oblong Office. His office. He'd tried to be fair. He'd tried to be merciful. It was others who forced him to act…ungentlemanly. All Vetinari had to do was sit quietly on his island and leave Ankh-Morpork to feed him and pay for his servants and get back on its feet without him. It would happen. Downey knew it would. The little bumps in the early days of his reign would surely smooth out. If he was free of interference.

            He took a paper out of a desk drawer.

            "I want the people on this list arrested. And…" He took a breath and exhaled slowly. "Send a clacks to Kinsey. Tell him Vetinari should be…" He made a sign with his hand.

            Lercaro didn't move.

            "You understand?"

            "Yes, sir. It's just that--"

            "What?"

            "His contract is at a million dollars, sir."

            "It isn't a contract, Lercaro, it's an edict of the Patrician."

            "But, sir--"

            "Do it!"

            When the clerk left, Downey went slowly to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a scotch. He was in a haze, his head unclear. That he'd ordered Vetinari's death wasn't the problem. It was that Vetinari – a lord, a gentleman – would ally himself with the riffraff of Ankh-Morpork. Prostitutes, beggars, thieves, cops, non-humans. Vetinari seemed to think power could be gained from the bottom up. The social values of Lord Downey were insulted by it. The world didn't work that way. Power came from the people educated, enlightened and financially independent enough to wield it appropriately – the upper class. Bad enough that Vetinari had shored up the City Council, which gave some measure of power to bakers, butchers, tinkers and other commoners. Now he had to appeal to the very bottom of the social ladder. Hanna Stein was obviously a bad influence.

            The list Lercaro gave to the head of the Palace Guard had a dozen names on it, including Samuel Vimes, Rosemary Palm, Queen Molly, Rufus Drumknott…


	12. XII

** I know I almost always thank all you great reviewers, but I have to do it in a specific way this time. Your comments about chapter 11 inspired me to rewrite some of the end of the story, in particular the scene where Downey gets his just desserts (in chap 13, coming right up – I swear). You've all helped me make the story better, so I thank you (*bows*). Happy Easter to all, and let the craziness continue!**

XII.      

            There was a small problem with Downey's arrest order. Several problems, actually.

            The biggest one confronted a row of Palace Guards lined up on Scoone Avenue. They faced the Ramkin House. And three of the most antiquated siege engines they'd ever seen. 

            "FIRE!" shouted Vimes. 

            Swords in the hands of Vimes, Sergeant Angua and Captain Carrot sliced the ropes on their respective catapults. The wood creaked and whined – the engines hadn't been used in centuries – and there was a moment when Vimes thought the damned things weren't going to work, but the arms finally whipped up.

            In the old days, the catapults were used by warlike Ramkin lords for the flinging of large boulders, plague victims or cows at the enemy. This didn't work now because of a range problem, good hygiene and lack of cows on the Ramkin-Vimes property. Sybil came up with an alternative. Or rather, Keith and Roderick did. They were heraldic animals that lived in a pond out back. And like all digesting creatures, what didn't come up through the mouth went out the other way. Somebody had to shovel it.

            Or catapult it, in this case.

            Three massive, steaming, stinking masses of heraldic doo arched gracefully threw the air. They shot like comets, leaving a trail behind them. The Guards made a run for it. They escaped with their lives and the need for a good dry cleaner.

**

            The Guards kicked in the door of the flat on Cheapside. They found a small desk with an ink pot and quill, but no papers. An unpleasant smell wafted up from a box under the desk, but it was empty. Bits of wire and wood lay on the floor near the potbelly stove. This wasn't interesting, but the small piece of paper stuck in the grate of the stove was. One of the guards opened the note.

            _DON'T PUSH THE BUTTON. _

_            Yours truly, Leonard._  

            There was something resembling a button on the bulbous surface of the stove. It looked like a thick nail had been hammered into the metal.

            The Guard who'd taken up the note came to the logical conclusion that it sounded like an order, and he didn't take orders from anybody but his captain and Lord Downey.

            He pressed the button.

            A few moments later, something thumped. It came from inside the pot belly stove and echoed out into the room. 

            The Guards looked at each other. 

            The thumps came again, slightly wet-sounding, the noise growing.

            The Guards slowly began to back out of the room. It's a good thing they did. Leonard of Quirm couldn't quite get the stove to produce enough energy to split thaums. After a visit to the market, Rufus Drumknott pointed out that there were other things that could be split just as well. 

            When the stove went boom, globs of something yellowish-white flew at the Guards. They screamed and tore at their eyes before they realized that nothing hurt. There was a distinctively fruity smell in the air.

            One Guard scooped a bit of the warm mass off his forehead and stuck the finger in his mouth. Didn't taste bad, really. But it'd be a right mess to clean up.

**

            The arrest of the guild leaders wasn't going any better. At the Beggars Guild, the Guards got annoyed at being addressed as "brother" and asked if they could spare something called a "dime." They were drooled and dribbled at so effectively that they left the guild hall without drawing their weapons. They were too busy wiping spittle off their armour. 

            At the Thieves Guild, the Guards stomped inside and made it all the way up to the office of assistant president Mr. Gloss before they realized that their weapons were gone. Well, not gone. In the hands of the burliest members of the Allied Trades. People who knew how to use a crowbar for more than jimmying open a door. They blocked the exits until the Guards asked them very nicely if they could give up and go home.

            Mrs. Palm politely greeted the Guards who'd gone to the Seamstress Guild to arrest her. Six middle aged women in black dresses and thick shoes were arrayed behind her desk. Each of them had a straw purse over her arm. Each purse looked like it carried at least one brick. This was true, but it wasn't what made the purses very dangerous indeed.

            "You intend to resist?" asked the head Guard.

            Mrs. Palm smiled. "I've sent a complaint to the Palace about this already."

            "Don't matter." The Guard waved at his colleagues. The moment they moved, the six women with the straw purses marched to the front of the desk and blocked it. They reached into their bags. 

            The Guards took a step backward.

            "Now, no need for that. We was just executing an order."

            The women were all smiling. Agony Aunts, the women who enforced the rules of play between clients and seamstresses, liked to smile when there was work to do. The instruments in their hands gleamed. They were sharp. It was obvious that they were not just used to cut thread.

            "Snip, snip," said Mrs. Palm.  

**

            The message was for Kinsey's eyes only. It was the first thing it said. When Kinsey glanced through the decoded note, he stared at it for a few moments, oblivious to the bickering going on around the dining room table at the guest house. The by-laws committee of the Assassins Guild Khavian Local 18 was meeting to hammer out amendments demanded by the membership. Kinsey was serving as interim vice president of the Local and was supposed to be chairing the committee.

            It occurred to him that the clacks from Lord Downey rendered all further work on the by-laws unnecessary.

            But he let the men continue, excused himself and strode out into the sunlight. Townsend's recent announcement that all surveillance should be called off had grated on Kinsey, mostly because Townsend couldn't come up with a plausible reason why they should do it. There was no order from Downey. Townsend had been downright evasive when he was questioned about it. But he'd put the question to a vote in the Local and won with 17 yeas, 1 nay.

            Kinsey went up to the villa. He came across Hanna in the hallway with a book cradled in her arm. She smiled.

            "Good afternoon, Mr. Kinsey."

            "Good afternoon, Miss Stein. Off to do some reading?"

            She tapped the book. "History of the 2nd Ephebian War. Only the recommendation of his lordship would drive me to this. The first and third wars were interesting but the _second_." She rolled her eyes.

            "Do you happen to know where he is?"

            "In the study. He said he had some work to do."

            "Thank you. Enjoy your book."

            He strolled off. Hanna went outside.

            The study door was open but Kinsey knocked anyway. Lord Vetinari was seated at the desk, a quill in his hand. He glanced up and waved him in.

            "Good afternoon, sir," said Kinsey.

            "Indeed it is, Mr. Kinsey. What a pleasant surprise. Would you like to take a seat?"

            "That's very nice of you, sir, thank you." Kinsey settled into an armchair opposite the desk. "Working on your book, sir?"

            "Oh, on several things. There really doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day, even here."

            "I feel the same way, sir. Yesterday I tried to find a Khavian Leper Plant. I walked around the whole island and couldn't find one by sundown."

            "Did you try the grottoes on the peninsula on the far widdershins side of the island?"

            Kinsey snapped his fingers. "I thought it might be there! I'll try it tomorrow. Thank you for the suggestion, sir."

            "Not at all."

            Kinsey looked out the window. He was smiling happily. Lord Vetinari watched for a while, then cleared his throat.

            "Is there anything else, Mr. Kinsey?"

            "Oh! Sorry, sir." Kinsey smiled sheepishly. He got to his feet. "I'm required to inform you under section 14, paragraph 7 stroke 2 of the Assassins Guild By-laws that I will be inhuming you under orders from Lord Downey."

            It was one of the more puzzling and archaic rules of the Guild that whenever possible, and especially for major contracts, the Assassin was required to tell his victim what was about to happen and who ordered it. It was only polite. Even murder had its etiquette.           

            Lord Vetinari set down his quill and folded his hands on the desk top.

            "I am sorry to hear that, Mr. Kinsey."

            "It is unfortunate, sir. You've been a model prisoner. Well, except for the episode with Miss Stein--"

            "Which is thankfully forgiven and forgotten. May I ask if you intend to perform the inhumation now?"

            "I wanted to ask what you preferred."

            Lord Vetinari blinked.

            "Whether I prefer to die now or at some scheduled time?"

            "Yes, sir. I was thinking maybe you wanted to tidy up your affairs, write some letters to friends and family or…" He shrugged. "…maybe spend some time with Miss Stein. I'm sure the fellows will take up a collection if she lowers her rates for you."

            "Ah. Very thoughtful." Vetinari put a hand over his smile. "Though I'm afraid Miss Stein is a hard-headed business woman. I doubt she would lower her standards even for me."

            "I'm sorry to hear that, sir."

            Lord Vetinari gazed at Kinsey's open, friendly face and wondered how he'd ever become an assassin. The man was a born gardener. Mild-mannered, patient, thoughtful, thorough, enthusiastic about plants. His parents probably forced him to go to the Assassins School as a boy when he belonged in a different field completely.  

            "I'm curious, Mr. Kinsey. What was the exact wording of Dr. Downey's order?"

            "I can't show you the message, sir. It's confidential."

            "Of course not. I merely wondered about the phraseology." Lord Vetinari waved a hand. "Words interest me."

            The message was folded in Kinsey's pocket. He pulled it out and read aloud just the part relevant to the moment.

            Lord Vetinari stroked his beard. "Have you showed it to Mr. Townsend?"

            Kinsey tucked the note away. "It was for my eyes only. Confidential as I said before, sir."

            "Hm." After a long pause, Vetinari stood up and held out a hand. "I congratulate you, Mr. Kinsey."

            "What for, sir?"

            "You're going to be a rich man. My contract is at a million dollars. You could buy a forest full of Khavian Leper Plants with that."

            "I hadn't really thought about it, sir."

            "You should! You should!" Vetinari put an arm around Kinsey's shoulders and walked him to the window. "It is the honour of an Assassin to inhume only for pay, and I do believe you will soon be filling the largest contract ever offered a single individual by the Guild. That is something to be proud of."        

            "I suppose so, sir."

            Kinsey was having trouble figuring out what to do with his hands. He hadn't been nervous when he walked in but there was something about having Lord Vetinari's arm around him that made him…uneasy. He'd put a tie on for the occasion but now he loosened it a little. The room was warm for his tastes even with the open window.

            Vetinari tightened his hold. Kinsey's throat went dry.

            "I would like to tell you something, Mr. Kinsey. I have spent most of my life in contact with the Assassins Guild and I have never met anyone more worthy of the honour of this contract than you. There are men of the wealthier nobility, so-called gentlemen, but most have forgotten the real meaning of the words courtesy, kindness and comradeship." He squeezed Kinsey's shoulder and smiled down at him. "I can't possibly allow you to fulfil this honourable duty without your colleagues knowing of it. I would like to personally inform them of my approval of the situation." 

            He leaned closer… 

            "You, Mr. Kinsey…" 

            …until their noses nearly touched.

            "…are _worthy_."

            A few moments passed, during which Vetinari's smile didn't waver and Kinsey didn't release the breath he'd been holding. 

            "Shall we…go inform the others?" said Vetinari.

            Kinsey finally let out the breath and took another and tried to calm himself. His heart was racing. 

            Vetinari steered him out of the villa and down the path to the guest house, his arm still around Kinsey's shoulders. Only at the guest house door did Vetinari released him.

            The by-laws committee stopped its work when they saw the look on Kinsey's face.

            "Problem, old chap?" asked the vice chair.

            In a black silk dressing gown, Townsend strolled into the dining room, a large mug of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He was yawning. Seeing Lord Vetinari woke him up instantly.

            "Something wrong?"

            Vetinari smiled broadly. "Gentlemen! I have wonderful news. Our very own Mr. Kinsey has received a message from Dr. Downey ordering my execution."

            There was silence in the room. All eyes swung to Kinsey. He blushed; he didn't like being the center of attention. 

            Townsend set down his cup. 

            "Execution?" 

            "That was the wording of the order, Mr. Townsend," said Vetinari. "Mr. Kinsey was kind enough to read it to me. I was quite sure congratulations from his colleagues were in order."

            The Assassins looked at each other.

            "Lord Downey really said execution?" 

            Kinsey pulled the message out of his pocket and read it over again. "Yes, that's what it says."

            "You can't execute anyone, Kinsey. You're an Assassin."

            Kinsey looked around at his colleagues. "I don't see what practical difference it makes."

            "It makes a tremendous difference," said Townsend. "Assassins _inhume_. It's an art form. We're not the men at the gallows or up on the scaffolding holding the axe. If we started going around executing people, we'd lower our professional standards."

            "I wasn't going to use an axe, Mr. Townsend."

            Off to the side, Vetinari listened with an air of amused interest.

            More Assassins crowded into the dining room and were informed of the situation. The conversation grew.

            "We need the exact definition of execute."

            "Putting someone to death by legal sentence, I should think."

            "Right. And we know to inhume is to put to death by paid contract."

            "So if Lord Downey said execute and not inhume, than it seems to me no one is going to get paid."

            "Kinsey, surely you aren't going to inhume Lord Vetinari for…_free_?"

            Horrified silence descended on the dining room. Kinsey pulled out the message from Downey and read it yet again. There was no denying it. Execution was the word.

            Lord Vetinari cleared his throat. "Dear me. There appears to be something of a jurisdictional problem. I will leave you gentlemen to sort it out. Do excuse me."

**

            Lord Downey spent four hours listening to complaints of the City Council from his seat at one end of the oval table in the Rats Chamber. Council members complained about fighting their way through the picketers outside the Palace just to get to the meeting. The Merchants complained that striking seamstresses lounging at the markets scared away respectable buyers. The Carters complained it was impossible to make deliveries without the remains of the City Watch enforcing traffic rules with a thoroughness it had never shown before. Heads of guilds related to baked goods and confections complained about the higher costs of imported grain and sugar because of the bad blood sown when Downey called in the debts of the Sto Plains cities. The dairymen weren't even on speaking terms with the Palace. 

            Worse, Queen Molly and Mrs. Palm both had their places at the table. They were flanked by gibbering beggars and a handful of Agony Aunts with straw purses hanging from brawny, folded arms.

            At a lull in the discussion, Queen Molly spoke up.

            "Harder job than you thought, eh, Downey?"

            "You will address me as Lord Downey, Molly."

            "You will address me as Your Majesty, Downey."

            There were snickers around the table. 

            "You are making a mistake working for him," said Downey, his eyes narrowed.

            Queen Molly sucked a tooth for a moment. "As usual, I'm working for my guild. Who are _you_ working for? The Assassins or yourself?"

            Even Downey knew enough not to get roped into that. 

            "I am working for the city. You all know that."

            The rumbling from around the table was not reassuring. 

            "Why are you still president of the Assassins, then?" 

            "That is an internal guild issue, Mr. Boggis," said Downey. "I am not required to answer it."

            "Then perhaps you could answer this." Mrs. Palm rose from her seat. She unfolded a piece of paper. The Council members looked at her intently and Downey, not a man given to premonitions, had a sudden idea what was about to happen. He'd had an inkling of it days before when he lost the argument to get Mrs. Palm and Queen Molly permanently expelled from the Council. He kicked himself for asking the Council in the first place. He should have just done it. He was the Patrician, for goodness sake. Even a phalanx of Assassins couldn't sway the minds of the Council. Intimidation didn't work anymore. There was a new mood in the air, different from when Downey took over.

            Mrs. Palm took her time reading over the paper. 

            "Perhaps, Dr. Downey, you could tell us why you ordered Lord Havelock Vetinari's execution without consulting the Council."

            It would seem that gasps were in order but there were none. A chilled silence descended over the Rats Chamber. Only a few of the members had known. Those who didn't were too stunned to do more than stare at Downey. 

            "An interesting question, Rosie," said Queen Molly. "Executing a former Patrician is a serious matter, one that should not be left up to a single member of this Council."

            Downey looked around at the faces. They were shocked, scared, angry. Lords Rust, Selachii, Venturii, faces furious. Why were they angry? They hated Vetinari as much as he did. He'd been quietly soliciting the lords all along for the funds required to inhume him – even Downey didn't have a million lying around – but there hadn't been any takers. Nobody had thought he was serious. And there was always the little thought that if – _if_ – Lord Vetinari returned to power, anyone on the list of people who donated funds to inhume him might as well mix himself a toxic cocktail and drink it down in the family crypt. It'd be better than the scorpion pit. 

            "The Council left it to me to decide Lord Vetinari's punishment," said Downey. "It was always possible that exile would not be sufficient to--"

            "Is he already dead?" asked Lord Rust with a mix of annoyance and hope.

            "Well, I… Confirmation should come at any moment."

            "I don't think he had the right to do that," said Boggis to his neighbor. "Not all by himself. Who does he think he is?"

            "What do you mean who do I think I am? I'm the Patrician."

            "You haven't been acting like one."

            The complaints started up fresh, a rush of them, everyone talking at the same time. Downey fielded the questions and accusations, batting them away as best he could but they picked at him like bee stings. Worn down already by the past months, he had a hard time keeping his temper. 

            "…and it is my prerogative – mine alone! -- as Patrician to order executions when I see fit. Not one of you has the right to question my authority."

            The lords rose from their seats, knuckles on the table, but Downey ignored them.

            "Can't you see what's happening?" he cried over the noise. "Vetinari is manipulating you right now! Putting words in the mouth of seamstresses, thieves and beggars…" He pointed at the wall. "…encouraging chaos outside just to undermine my work. Don't you see? He'll sabotage his own city rather than let anyone else run it. Do you want to go back to being lapdogs to a man like that?"

            The chamber door opened. The grim look on the face of the clerk Lercaro caused the silence to come again, deeper this time. He walked up to Downey and handed him a piece of paper. 

            The message was read in a split second. Downey read it, processed it, and knew in the end what it meant for him. 

            He looked at Queen Molly. She was smiling at him expectantly, as if waiting for him to give the punch line of a joke. Mrs. Palm was sterner. Downey got the feeling they knew the contents of the note already. 

            He put it in his pocket.

            There were choruses of "What's it say?" from around the table. Downey let them demand it but said nothing. He sat back in his chair and stared at the table. He was looking pale. Greenish pale. Lercaro slipped out to get a bucket.

            "May I take a guess?" asked Mrs. Palm. "Is it possible that the message says something along the lines of: _Nil mortifi, sine lucre_?" 

            The Council knew the Assassins motto well. A few moments later, they had all deduced its immediate application. 

            Queen Molly scratched her chin. "Hm. Appears your Assassins were expecting a financial incentive for the deed, eh, Downey? Which leads me to think what you ordered was an inhumation."

            "I was thinking the same thing, Molly," said Mrs. Palm. "A grave matter, ordering an inhumation and trying to avoid the million dollar price tag by claiming it's an official execution. I might even call that fraud." She turned to the rest of the Council. "Wouldn't you?"

** Stay tuned for the final chapter… **


	13. XIII

** Here's the last chapter! Thanks to all of you who've come all this way with the story, lurkers and reviewers alike. The next instalment of the saga is already underway and is coming along nicely (so far). Towards the end of Absentia, you'll get a hint what the new story should be about. No promises, though, and no timetable yet. Thanks for your encouragement, comments, curses, questions, appreciation!** 

XIII.    

            The delegation elected by the City Council to personally appeal to Lord Vetinari to return to Ankh-Morpork and resume his position as Patrician included the heads of the major guilds, Lord Downey too, who had been railroaded into sailing with the others to Khavos. The other lords had advised him that a show of repentance might make Vetinari allow him to keep his presidency of the Assassins Guild. And his skin, of course.             

            The ten members of the delegation landed at the island's small pier, tramped up the path to the villa and were ushered into what the housekeeper called the Sun Room. It was well after six o'clock, a time when the sun had already begun to sink, softening the room with a golden light. 

            It added to the Council members' shock.

            Lord Vetinari was stretched out on an elegantly carved couch, an arm draped over the back, a book in his lap and a half empty glass of white wine beside him. Perhaps it was the light – it had to be – but he looked years younger. The pallor of his skin was gone. His face when he looked up in apparent surprise at his visitors was relaxed, healthy, the face of a man who got plenty of peaceful sleep. It had been years since any of the delegation members had seen him wear anything but a black robe but there he was, in dark blue trousers and a loose white shirt open at the throat. He wore no shoes.

            "Ah! I do beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen," he said, setting his book aside. "I expected you an hour or two later. I shall make myself presentable forthwith. Now…where is  my jacket?" He glanced around. "Hanna? Have you seen my jacket?"

            The delegation had been so busy staring at Vetinari that they hadn't noticed Hanna sitting at a small table in the windowed bay facing the sunset and the ocean. She was sewing. She bit the thread, shook out the embroidered peach shawl and draped it over her arms. Vetinari allowed her to help him into the jacket she'd fetched from the back of her chair.

            "I am so happy to finally have guests," she said. "You will all be amazed at what the cook can do. We thought you might like to try some of the local delicacies. I hope you're ready for something spicy."

            Mrs. Palm and Queen Molly smiled.

            Vetinari puttered around the room, scanning the floor. "Where _did_ I put my shoes?"

            "I don't know where you put them," said Hanna.

            "I thought they were under the divan." 

            "Did you look behind the hibiscus?"

            "Of course I looked behind the hibiscus. It was the first place I looked."

            The delegates looked warily at each other. They weren't altogether sure what was going on.

            Hanna bobbed behind the divan and reappeared holding a pair of black shoes.

            "They were here all the time. You didn't even look."

            "I certainly did." Vetinari slipped them on. 

            "If you'd looked, you would've found them."

            "I simply don't have your uncanny ability to see things that are there."

            They straightened up, Vetinari fully suited, Hanna tan and outdoorsy-looking in her  sleeveless gown and shawl. Simultaneously, they gave the delegation near identical smiles. 

            "We shall try this again," he said. "Welcome, ladies and gentleman, to the Casa Vetinari. It is indeed wonderful to see you all here. Have you seen the house and grounds?"

            There was a cough. 

            "It's urgent that we get right down to business," said Lord Rust. "We've come to--"

            "Surely not before dinner," said Hanna. She took Mrs. Palm's arm. "I insist on showing all of you the gardens at the very least. There is an ancient dragon tree on the third terrace that you _must_ see."

            "Miss Stein, a tree is not our concern at the moment," said the delegation's only zombie.

            "Hanna insists, Mr. Slant, and believe me, it is useless to resist her," said Vetinari. "I have one year, eight months, two weeks and two days experience to back me up."

            "Do follow me everyone," said Hanna. "Watch your step here."

            The smile of encouragement on Vetinari's face and Hanna's determination made the delegation slowly file out behind her. Lord Downey was stopped by a hand on his shoulder.

            "A moment of your time, Dr. Downey. I am curious about one or two tiny matters…" 

            Vetinari was no longer smiling.

*          

            Only after the post-dinner coffee was served did Lord Vetinari allow members of the delegation to bring up the matter at hand. By then, they had seen the house and gardens, taken in the view to the sea and eaten a chicken and potato dish that featured a fiery Ephebian pepper sauce that shocked the bland palates of the Morporkians. Vetinari swiped up the last of the sauce off his plate with a piece of bread and ate it without breaking a sweat. Several of the delegates were worried about the effects of the sauce on their digestion. Stomach powders had been ordered. It was the ideal time, in Vetinari's view, for business.

            Mr. Slant delivered the unnecessarily long preamble.

            "…and so, your lordship, we at the Council hoped that you would excuse the unpleasantness of the past months and shoulder once again the burdens of office."

            Boggis wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Hanna opened a window and returned to stand behind Vetinari's seat. She draped a hand over his shoulder.

            He gazed around the table at the uncomfortable faces, lingering longer on Downey, who looked like he'd turned to stone. He hadn't said a word during dinner. 

            "I am honoured to receive this request. Doubly honoured that you have come here to deliver it personally. I have thought over the matter and…" Lord Vetinari hooked a hand with Hanna's. "…I am afraid I must refuse."

            "Come now, Havelock," said Lord Selachii. "We hoped you would take this gracefully."

            "No need to make us beg," muttered the head of the Merchants Guild.

            "I wouldn't dream of it, sir. Yet I must point out that I have genuinely enjoyed my time here. The air is invigorating, the peacefulness of the island a balm to the soul. I have had time to pursue interests that were impossible in Ankh-Morpork. The library here is excellent. It will take me years to read everything in it."

            "You can't just refuse," said Boggis.

            "An aviary of some kind would transform the garden into a veritable paradise, wouldn't it, Hanna, my dear?" Vetinari demonstratively squeezed her hand. "Cages are quite cruel; I would prefer free-roaming birds. Some peacocks, perhaps."

            "I like ducks," said Hanna.

            "Parrots," said Vetinari, nodding. "We could import them from some of the neighboring islands. Khavos appears to be parrot-poor but we can remedy that."

            The Council members stared at them. "You can't be serious," said Lord Rust.

            "And don't forget the flamingos," said Hanna.

            "Flamingos go without saying," said Vetinari. He smiled up at her. She smiled down at him. "So you see, ladies and gentlemen, I have other concerns at the moment than taking up the reins of office. Though once again I do thank you for the offer."

            There was silence in the dining room. It had not entered the minds of any of the delegates that Vetinari would refuse his old post. Even Mrs. Palm and Queen Molly were affected by the moment of uncertainty. The possibility that Havelock Vetinari had changed his mind and was content with toppling Downey without interrupting his…

            …retirement.

            It was true that he had occasionally talked about retiring, about taking up gardening in some lonely house when his work for the city was done. No one had believed it. It was just something that was said. One day, years from now, long in the future, perhaps it will happen. People said things like that. People like Vetinari weren't supposed to mean it.

            Lord Rust scowled, his elbows on the table. "All right, Havelock. What do you want?"

            "I beg your pardon?"

            Mr. Slant unfolded a piece of paper from his suit pocket and dryly cleared his throat.

            "The City Council is willing to make the following concessions. Point One,  on the matter of municipal taxes, the guilds have agreed to…"

**

            A month later, a rainy Sektober in Ankh-Morpork, a reception was held at the Palace. It was a thank you from the Patrician Lord Vetinari to the people who'd made his return possible, and a signal to all the others that he was back in business.

            Sam Vimes was there puffing rings from his cigar, his wife Sybil arrayed in a healthy amount of dark green silk. The City Watch had been brought back up to its old strength and Vimes was Commander Vimes once again. Not normally invited to Palace events, Buggy Swires was living it up, quaffing beer and being kicked by some of the finest ladies in the city. Detritus lumbered after him but the gnome flitted from silk skirt to velvet, dancing out of the troll's grasp.

            Mrs. Palm, Queen Molly, Mr. Boggis and Mr. Gloss beamed at the guests. They were looking pleased with the way things had turned out. As were the guests whose businesses had returned to normal after the repeal of the Milk Tax and the end of the Seamstress strike. The Guild of Brewers was also represented, partly by members of Hanna's family, who were relieved that their breweries were under Vetinari's protection again.

            Non-humans mingled in the crowd. Their fellows throughout the city were rejoicing at Vetinari's symbolic rewording of Ankh-Morpork's statutes to include "citizens of all species."

            Various ambassadors were there, many of them relieved to have Vetinari back in the saddle. Business contracts and foreign treaties were put into effect again, diplomatic relationships smoothed over. Most of the ambassadors thought the Patrician something of a snake but the competent snake you knew was better than the incompetent one you didn't.

            Which led to Downey, who was also there. He was drinking his wine out of a straw that was sunk in a glass held under his chin by a servant. His hands were wrapped in thick white bandages. He'd been allowed to remain president of the Assassins Guild, a bigger punishment than if he'd been thrown into the Palace scorpion pit. Now he was there at Vetinari's (dis)pleasure and everyone knew it. Whenever he joined the lords for a meeting in the Oblong Office, Downey had to sit in the corner. It wasn't easy. Literally.

            Shortly after Vetinari's return, he and Downey closeted themselves up in a soundproof room in the Palace dungeon. They didn't discuss Downey's future; that had been sorted out during their private talk on the island. This meeting was something else.

            Downey immediately took off his jacket and tie, unstrapped the dagger from his right arm and set it aside. He rubbed his hands.

            "And now you're going to give me one for your bloody seamstress, eh? Her knight in shining armour." He smirked. 

            The Patrician leaned on his stick. He stared. It was the snake stare, uncomfortably long and menacing.

            "She's just a whore, Vetinari. Have you forgotten that? You embarrass yourself every time you show her public favour. It embarrasses me. I'm a lord too, you know. You can't let that kind of thing get out of hand. It makes us all look bad."

            "I am sorry to hear that, Downey."

            "But then," the smirk again, "you never did know how to deal with a real woman. A _lady_. And I don't mean undead ones."

            The stick rotated in Vetinari's hands, the silver knob gleaming in the torch light.

            "I suppose you are right, Downey."

            "Go on. Take a swing." Downey held out his arms. "You can have the first punch."

            The Patrician appeared to consider this.

            "Go on!" Downey said. "If we'd done this years ago, a hell of a lot would have been sorted out."

            Vetinari's stick tapped once on the floor.

            "Come on, Dogbotherer! Swing! Are you a man or a mouse?"

            "Interesting you should ask that, Downey. The issue of rodents was on my mind just now."

            The stick tapped the floor a second time.

            The rats flooded in from every corner of the room, a silent, seething mass of gray and brown fur and long whip tails. Some of the rats wore scraps of cloth, a vest here, a little hat there. One of the larger rats, gray with red eyes, stood up on its hind legs and saluted Vetinari with a tiny claw.

            "Ah, Skrp. Punctual, as usual. I do appreciate that."

            The rats at the Palace had tunnels all the way to Unseen University. Some of the magic had rubbed off, making them even more clever than they were before. Lord Vetinari advised Skrp and his people and they assisted him whenever he asked. 

            Downey was backed up against the wall. He started laughing. It rolled out of him until there were tears on his face.

            "This is so typical," he said. "I was thinking – Can Vetinari get any lower? Is there any form of life lower than harlots, beggars and thief-takers he could ally himself with? And look." He waved around the room. "Rats. Perfect. I should have guessed." He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. "Will you be calling out your army of roaches next? Or perhaps a division of ants? I'm sure you have very vicious fish around here somewhere."

            "No, Downey," said the Patrician. "There's just the rats. Skrp, please avoid anything above the waist. Focus on the hands. No permanent damage. You have thirty minutes."

            The rats clustered at Downey's feet.

            "Vetinari. Wait."

            The Patrician went to the door.

            "Wait! This isn't necessary. We can talk about—"

            Skrp let out an authoritative squeak and the rats started pouring up Downey via his trouser legs.

            "STOP! I DEMAND TO—" Downey started kicking. "VETINA--"

            The door slammed and locked. Lord Vetinari went upstairs to join Hanna for tea. She'd chosen Downey's punishment but didn't have the stomach to watch it. Downey always had such nice legs.

            Since then, Downey had limped around, his hands bandaged up. He had to be dressed, undressed, fed and privied by a servant. The Palace reception was his first social event since the episode with the rats. He was stared at, whispered about. That was worse than the pain and the helplessness and the lattice of tiny scars he'd always carry.

            Townsend and Kinsey weren't at the reception but they'd got their rewards already; a promotion in the Assassins Guild for Townsend, and for Kinsey, a post as assistant to the Palace gardener.

            Lord Vetinari, back in his old black robes but still looking rested and healthy, was standing on a raised dais beside Hanna. She was promised a revised contract identical to the old one except for four key words that he'd felt it necessary to insert. He hadn't said what they were and he hadn't shown her the new version yet. After the reception, he'd said.

            He was winding down the hand outs of rewards to his supporters. The Seamstresses this time.

            "…and this sacrifice will be returned to them with interest at three and a half percent-"

            "We did agree on four percent," whispered Hanna.

            "…_four_ percent, to be evenly distributed to the membership quarterly over the next calendar year."

            The Patrician beamed over the crowd. 

            "Again, let me thank you all for your energetic support. It is a relief to know that during my holiday, the city was in good hands." He shot Downey a wide smile. "Alas, there is still quite a lot of work to be done, so I believe…" He waved toward the refreshments. 

            A few people drifted toward them but the rest stayed, trying not to look embarrassed. They were staring at Hanna. Some blinked significantly or coughed or nicked their heads in her direction.

            The Patrician looked puzzled for a moment, then turned in surprise as if he hadn't known she'd been standing beside him all along. 

            "Dear me. I forgot Miss Stein. Did I call you miss? I do beg your pardon, _milady_." 

            There were gasps from the crowd. Hanna stared out over the heads of the people, her face frozen but her mind working. Milady. He _hadn't_…

            "An old habit that I shall quickly break, I assure you," the Patrician was saying. "I meant of course to use the title appropriate to your new status. As you know, the island of Khavos and the title it carries with it passed to Ankh-Morpork after the baron's death. There is no need for the city to retain either one. As of now, it doesn't."

            Lady Hanna, Baroness of Khavos, bit the inside of her cheek. Hard. She was determined not to smile, not to show one emotional twitch on her face. She wasn't all that happy with the stares she was getting from the nobles in the crowd. Downey choked on his straw. A servant had to remove it from his mouth for him.

            "Your duties as baroness will not be too strenuous or fiscally draining," the Patrician said. "At your leave, I hope to perhaps visit your barony once a year for a short constitutional. I found it very relaxing. Since one never knows when one may have time to travel, the cost of upkeep of the house and grounds will of course be my responsibility."

            There was applause, cheers from Hanna's family and the seamstresses, polite patter claps from the nobles, and whistles from Buggy Swires, which died out under the glare of Vimes. Sybil gave Hanna a monstrous hug, and Hanna's family squeezed the air out of her. 

            The seamstresses surrounded her for several minutes. Mrs. Palm kissed her on both cheeks and the two smiled at each other, arm in arm. They didn't say anything; it was all on Mrs. Palm's face. Honour to the Guild. No seamstress had been ennobled in centuries.

            Rufus Drumknot was back as Vetinari's secretary. He appeared with a letter for Hanna, which turned out to be from Madam Meserole. It congratulated the new baroness and invited her for a visit. Madam's letter used phrases like "woman-to-woman" and "heart-to-heart." Hanna wondered if the Patrician had seen it. 

            Eventually, she was left alone on the dais. It was clear what four words had been inserted into her contract. Lord Vetinari had always been a stickler for the proper use of titles. What still puzzled her was the Assassins Guild contract. He'd had hers raised _before_ his exile and the baroness nonsense. He wouldn't tell her why.   

            She felt a light pressure on her hand, then gentle taps and brushes.

            W.e.l.c.o.m.e.t.o.t.h.e.n.o.b.i.l.i.t.y.

            "You have some nerve pulling a Vimes on me, your lordship," she whispered.

            I.n.t.e.r.e.s.t.i.n.g.p.h.r.a.s.e.m.i.l.a.d.y.

            "Stop calling me that, sir. The ladies all hate me except Sybil and the Duchess of Quirm. I'll never get along with the rest. I don't _want_ to be noble."

            The Patrician smiled. "Life is much easier if you are satisfied with what you are. And now I believe we should mingle. I'm afraid it is expected of a gentleman and lady of our social position."

            Lord Vetinari and Lady Hanna mingled all the way up to Lord Downey. Every time the Patrician's politely threatening manner forced Downey to cough out a "milady," Hanna started to see the benefits of nobility after all. 

END


End file.
